The Video Toaster

[rootabaga]

Anyone ever heard of this? It was a revolution for low-budget video rendering aimed at television.

The video demo/intro looks cheesy and dated now, and the musical track (and the "wow!" announcer tracks...) is...well, dated as well.

Still, for the day, it was a simple and amazing breakthrough.

 

[Fox Mulder]

Yes, it revolutionized the wedding-video industry.
The problem was when people wanted to use them as a cheap production switcher for a professional or broadcast system, the output quality wasn't quite up to snuff. When you looked at it on a waveform monitor it was not pretty.
Nowadays Newtek makes the Tricaster, which is a switcher/studio in a box that runs on Windows. Full HD, multi-format capable with lots of features, but not terribly stable and they crash a lot.
Another cool product from Newtek that was only made for a short time is the Calibar, which was a pen-sized NTSC signal generator that could output something like 24 different high-quality test signals. I still have mine and they pop up on Ebay once in a while going for good money.