A Toaster card alone is still cool
and will allow you to add titles, overlays,
transitions, fade between sources etc. but
you have to have additional analog "VCR"
style recording equipment and work in a more
traditional "linear" editing fashion.
On the other hand if you add a Flyer board
to a Toaster system suddenly you have a full
blown digital non-linear-editor that still
holds its own today and features all the
capabilities of the Toaster card in conjunction.
I have an A4000T/060 with Toaster/Flyer and the
quality and speed is pretty amazing. You could
still use a system like this for professional work
and many people do. Get an external DVD recorder
or 2nd computer to assist with 3D Rendering etc.
and it's quite a good system.
Plays back video in broadcast quality directly
from the hard drive at 60 fields / 30 frames per
second with 16 bit sound and full video overscan
while overlaying titles and doing transitions in
realtime using the Toaster card. There are certainly
a few limitation to work around but add-ons like
"Millenium" from Nova Design or "LayerPlayer" etc.
can fill the gaps. Overall Toaster/Flyer is still
really good and one of the only ways to use an
Amiga for high quality video editing. There still
exists a fairly active T/F mailing list too.
