Was Babylon 5 made on Amigas?

It all starts with the Video Toaster, a board from NewTek, of Topeka, Kansas, designed by Tim Jenison: the engineer Brad Carvey built the first prototype and Steve Kell wrote the software. It came out in December 1990 for the Amiga 2000, at $2,399, and worked as a video switcher, with luminance keying (luma key), a character generator, animation and image processing. It only worked on the A2000, not the A500 or the A1000, and won a technical Emmy in 1993 ^[1].

The board came with a 3D program, LightWave 3D. It grew out of two programs from 1988, Allen Hastings's VideoScape 3D and Stuart Ferguson's Modeler, and the name is a tribute to two expensive packages of the time, Intelligent Light and Wavefront. It was only sold on its own from 1994, and the last Amiga version, 5.0, is from 1995 ^[2].

About the pilot there is no doubt: the starships of The Gathering came out of a network of Amigas.

Babylon 5 is the example everyone quotes. The pilot, The Gathering, from 1993, won that year's Emmy for special visual effects for Paul Beigle-Bryant, Shannon Casey and Ron Thornton, of Foundation Imaging ^[3]. Thornton had started out experimenting with starships on an Amiga with a Video Toaster ^[4]. About the pilot there is no doubt: it was made on a network of Amigas ^[5].

For the series, the sources do not agree. One version speaks of 24 Amiga 2000s with Video Toasters in the first season, 16 of them just for rendering, at an average of 45 minutes per frame ^[4]; another says that throughout Foundation Imaging's time on the show, the first three seasons, the work was done on 12 Pentium PCs and 5 DEC Alpha workstations running LightWave ^[5]. And Wikipedia itself, in another article, says the Amiga hardware was used for the first three seasons ^[1]. We found no documentation from the time to settle it.

With seaQuest DSV, from 1993, it is the same story: all the exterior shots of the submarine were made in LightWave 3D ^[1], but we found no solid source saying which machines they were rendered on.

What is certain is the weight of the combination. The Video Toaster brought video production to an unusually low price ^[1], and the work on Babylon 5 made LightWave a reference tool for television effects in the 1990s ^[4]. Today's effects, odd-looking in the widescreen editions, are another story: they were made in 4:3 and Warner cropped and stretched them to 16:9 ^[5].