About Cabi-Soft - Video Ease

At the time, 1991, the only video titling software you could get for the Amiga would cost you about £300 - way out of the reach of the average user. As Genlocks lowered in price, the home video market began to expand and the need for a cheap, home-user based titling program opened up. I was working in a computer shop at the time, and noticed more people asking if there was such a thing, sadly there wasn't.

Shortly afterwards I began to experiment with adding titles to a holiday video, and quickly realised with a little user customisation, it could be turned into a cheap application.

I initially set about creating a program that allowed ten, double-lined titles to be used in various different ways. Scrolling up, scrolling across, fading in etc... Each line could have its own font and colour, and I even created some nice fonts that suited titling. Once this was done I added a few wipes, ten I think, which could be of various colours, speeds and directions.

I approached my boss at the store to see what he thought, and knowing the market as I did, knew we could sell it to the public - if we could find a backer. This proved impossible despite sending various demo versions out to the distributors. In the end we decided to go it alone and fund the venture ourselves.

I took some photographs in the store room of the shop, he organised the boxes, I wrote the manual and produced the disk label, and we both set about duplicating 500 disks. The only thing we had to pay for were the boxes (a video-style box) and the printing of the sleeve.

Once this was done and the first batch arrived we placed a few adverts in various magazines (anyone got one? please let me know) and waited for the sales to come in.

They didn't!

In the end I remember my boss coming to me and saying after a sale that with that one, we were now in the black and anything after that we would split 50/50.

I think we sold very few after that - making me something like £15.00.

Version 2 was 99.9% finished and ready to roll, but sadly it was not to be. It would have improved the program 100%, with much more control over things and double the amount of wipes/fonts and available credit lines.

I still have the source code for version 1 and 2, along with some other games I never completed.