CompuServe Thread

Re: PAL Toaster. The data in the Toaster framebuffer is a sampled composite NTSC video signal (like D2). This gives you less data to deal with and manipulate than RGB. The Toaster software actually calculates what the NTSC signal would look like at a particular point in time to write a pixel in the frame buffer. The Toaster hardware relies on certain NTSC video characteristics. One being that the color information is encoded onto the BW carrier signal in 4 "pixel" long time increments. It's kind of like HAM mode, where the color of a pixel is determined by the colors of the preceding pixels. This is why you see a "chunky" look to the DVE effects. The hardware is manipulating the data in chunks because it would be very difficult to calculate the correct color for individual pixels. That's easy to do in RGB, not so easy with an NTSC video signal (or HAM mode). But you don't have to calculate the colors or deal with individual pixels at all if you work with the data in groups which correspond to the NTSC color encoding cycles. Anyway, the point is, PAL video does not encode color the way NTSC does. Newtek could probably rewrite their software to read/write digitized PAL waveforms, they could probably change their encoder/decoder to do PAL, but they can't do their DVE effects in PAL and get correct colors without a lot more processing bandwidth in the hardware. A BW Toaster or one without DVEs, probably would not be a big seller. It's not that Newtek doesn't care about the PAL market, there is a real technical reason the current design can't do PAL. Newtek had a very clever hardware design which required NTSC color encoding. The choice was either NTSC only, or duke it out with everyone else who was trying to do digital video in a color space model (like RGB). -Jerry Thompson