Forums | Newtek

YouTube shows you how to set up a TriCaster in 10 minutes. The NewTek Forums tell you why your NDI feed drops every 47 minutes when connected to a specific Netgear switch. For broadcast engineers, these granular, packet-level discussions are worth their weight in gold.

Before Reddit and Discord, support lived on bulletin boards. NewTek’s community began in the late 1980s on CompuServe and Usenet newsgroups (specifically comp.sys.amiga.video). When the Video Toaster launched for the Amiga, users needed a place to share toaster recipes (the slang for script files). newtek forums

As the company migrated to Windows with the Flyer and later the TriCaster, the community migrated to web-based forums. The current iteration of the NewTek Forums (hosted on the NewTek website) has been active for over two decades. However, it is essential to note that following the acquisition of NewTek by Vizrt in 2019, the forum landscape shifted slightly. YouTube shows you how to set up a TriCaster in 10 minutes

The Vizrt Migration: In recent years, the official forums have moved under the Vizrt umbrella. While the URL may have changed, the soul of the community remains. The archives contain nearly every solved error code, workaround, and creative technique for products ranging from the defunct VT[4] to the latest TriCaster 2 Elite. Before Reddit and Discord, support lived on bulletin boards

Perhaps the most famous section of the NewTek Forums was dedicated to LightWave 3D. In the 1990s and early 2000s, LightWave was the dominant 3D application for television visual effects (used in Babylon 5, Star Trek: Voyager, and Battlestar Galactica).

The LightWave forums were a hive of high-level technical discussion. Unlike modern social media, the discourse here was deep. Users shared custom LScript codes, debated the nuances of radiosity rendering, and dissected the physics of digital lighting. It was an informal university for 3D artists, where professionals and hobbyists rubbed shoulders.