Amiga Forever Videos

DVD 0:

• Amiga Forever Plus Edition software
• Dave Haynie 2009 Interview (2009, 30')
• Dave Haynie 2009 Interview - HD (2009, 30')

DVD 1:

• Launch of Amiga (1985, 17')
• Inside Commodore (1988, 40')
• Jay Miner Speech (1989, 49')
• Jay Miner Interview (1990, 9')
• History of the Amiga (1992, 43')

DVD 2:

• The Deathbed Vigil (1994, 118')
• Dave Haynie 2001 Interview (2001, 55')
• Amiga Faces Picture Gallery (1988-2005, 50')

Additional DVD features and details:

• Region 0 (all regions)
• CSS-free (no encryption)
• Video content in NTSC format (as in the original footage, also compatible with most PAL DVD players, including 100% of those tested by us in 2005)
• Menus and subtitles in English and Italian

These are, in our opinion, "must see" videos about the Amiga, the C64 and Commodore in general, which took a lot of time and hard work to create and process, also licensing hard-to-find materials that were presented to the general public for the first time in Amiga Forever.

This video collection will allow you to connect people and facts in new ways, as it better exposes the relationship between Commodore, the Amiga, an increasingly mature PC market, and the ups and downs of the video games industry. The videos also contain touching biographical parts, TV ads, precious insights into the history of personal computing and multimedia, and many an interesting lesson in project and business management, with a special focus on areas such as IT, startups, the consumer market and the video games industry.

We took the extra effort of adding subtitles in multiple languages in order to make these pieces of Amiga history and culture accessible to the widest possible audience. In addition to consuming an enormous amount of internal resources, the transcriptions and the translations would not have been possible without the generous help of a group of several dozen volunteers from all over the world.

Online Videos

A selection of original video content is available in the Amiga Forever page on Facebook. More videos are available at YouTube.com/Cloanto. Please subscribe to the channel in order to not miss future updates.

Technical Details

The original sources of all videos usually were NTSC VHS tapes, often chosen from the best version of multiple available ones, and in a few cases combining the best data from different tapes. The Jay Miner Speech video was digitized from a combination of Beta SP tape for the event footage and digital MPEG data for the original titles. The Jay Miner interview has its own story. The Dave Haynie interview was digitized from a combination of 8 mm video and an additional MD audio source. The videos were digitized, enhanced and encoded to the highest quality standards using the latest technology.

We took the greatest care in handling and converting the original tapes, using professional conversion labs and equipment, and we kept digital copies (in part uncompressed) to preserve the materials from the slow decay of analog tapes. Like our software archives, this data is stored at multiple locations and using file systems that incorporate bitrot detection and repair mechanisms.

Future releases may be superresolution-enhanced and/or be encoded using technologies other than MPEG-2 (a current DVD standard). Actually, superresolution technology (which combines data from multiple video frames to generate higher-resolution frames) has already been used to create some of the still pictures used on the Amiga Forever packaging and website.

Ongoing Work

Amiga Forever as a whole, and its videos in particular, are a manifestation of a multiplicity of challenges we are facing. Like any passionate but small organization, we wish we had more resources available. As a successor of Commodore/Amiga we feel an additional burden and sense of duty for a cultural heritage that should be neither lost nor locked away.

Cloanto has been considering the idea of setting up a nonprofit/foundation dedicated to preservation for some time, and we hope that other projects may be successful enough to make this possible. In the meantime, some original content is currently exclusive to the Amiga Forever documentary series and helps support our ongoing preservation and dissemination work. We are also working with some of the most renowned preservation institutions to make sure that this legacy is preserved and will remain accessible for posterity.

Ongoing efforts include:

• Collecting and preserving new materials, and best-quality versions of existing materials
• Work on a new documentary using 3D HD technologies
• Adding subtitles for new content, and in more languages (in particular German, Spanish, French and Japanese)
• Releasing more content via online channels

We found the experience of creating transcripts and subtitles, which inevitably includes the repeat watching and listening to the same footage, to be quite rewarding also from the point of view of getting an almost intimate inside view of the stories told in the videos. If you would like to assist in this field, please get in touch.

We are always looking for new videos to preserve and make available. We keep being surprised by how new and better-quality content emerges from time to time, even decades after it was shot.

If you have an interesting video or suggestion, or if you found any inaccuracies in the transcripts or subtitles, please let us know.