NewTek
The company's first products included DigiView in 1986[4] and DigiPaint, both for the Commodore Amiga personal computer.
DigiView was the first full-color video digitizer, and added slow-scan digitizing capabilities to the Amiga platform, allowing images to be imported at low cost, before modern image scanning technology was widely available. Consisting of an input module that allowed the connection of a standard black-and-white video camera (security cameras were popularly used), greyscale images could be captured to the Amiga. With the addition of a color wheel, full color images could be captured by rotating the wheel's red, green, and blue segments in front of the lens and capturing the same image three times, once through each filter. This could be done manually, or with a further motorized accessory. The software combined the color information from the three images into one color image. According to the company, DigiView sold over 100,000 units.[5]
The Amiga hardware included the ability to display 4096 colors on the screen simultaneously, and DigiPaint allowed graphic artists to draw with a variety of tools in that full color space at a time when IBM PCs were typically limited to between 4 and 16 colors. The DigiPaint product offered at release the unique capability of editing and painting on images in the Amiga's unique hold-and-modify high color mode in real time.
The company found widespread fame and started the desktop-video revolution with the release of the Video Toaster, an innovative system for low cost video switching and post production.[5][6] The company was featured in magazine articles in such mainstream publications as Rolling Stone and was featured on the NBC Nightly News. In the early 1990s, a proliferation of video effects in television shows is directly attributable to the Video Toaster's effect of lowering the cost of video-processing hardware from the $100K range into the $4K range.[citation needed] One specific example is the television show Home Improvement, which used a video toaster transition for every cut between scenes—beginning with black and white transitions in the early 90s, and upgrading to color and 3D transition effects as later versions of the Video Toaster were released.[citation needed]
In addition, the company developed Lightwave 3D, a 3D modeling, rendering, and animation system, which has been used extensively in television and film, with early adoption by the television series Babylon 5, which eschewed models for space scenes, and was 100% CGI from the first episode using the NewTek software.
The fame of Video Toaster extended beyond the product; the company's founder Tim Jenison and its Vice President Paul Montgomery also were presented as new types of entrepreneurs running a new and different kind of company.[7]
Jenison and Montgomery eventually split, with Montgomery leaving to help form a new company called Play, Inc., which ceased operations after Montgomery's untimely death.[8][9]
Now[when?] based in San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A., the company is led by Jenison, and former magazine publisher and ReplayTV executive, Jim Plant, who is the President and CEO.[citation needed]
In 2005, NewTek founder, Tim Jenison was inducted into the San Antonio Inventors Hall of Fame as the "Father of Desktop Video".