[HN Gopher] Quantel Paintbox History
___________________________________________________________________
Quantel Paintbox History
Author : dcminter
Score : 29 points
Date : 2025-01-27 21:03 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantelpaintbox.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantelpaintbox.com)
| AlanYx wrote:
| Quantel is a good example of how pivoting to patent litigation
| against competitors generally foreshadows a formerly innovative
| company's demise.
| sherr wrote:
| Yes, I believe it left quite a bad taste in the mouths of many
| a small software house. At least those trying to compete
| against them with a "software" paint brush,
| mrandish wrote:
| The infamous Quantel "Airbrush" patent war was pretty crazy. A
| bunch of companies settled with Quantel rather than fight even
| though the patent claim was clearly bogus. Fortunately, Adobe
| decided to go all-in on fighting it and it was apparently a
| huge battle. Thanks to that, ordinary mortals were able to have
| soft-edged airbrush strokes in not just Photoshop but every
| cheap and open-source paint program.
| lysace wrote:
| > priced around $450,000 each in todays money
|
| Honestly seems underpriced for what it was at the time. They
| should have looked at e.g. Cray Inc for pricing inspiration. They
| delivered something conceptually similar; a time machine into the
| future.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The drive arrays back then were crazy expensive as well. One
| 90GB array was made up from 2 16-drive chassis. The price tag
| was more than a house. This was connected to an Onyx 2 running
| Discreet's Inferno. The Onyx 2 wasn't cheap. The cheapest part
| of any of it was the software, which wasn't cheap in its own
| right either. That was back in the day's of charging $1,000+/hr
| for sessions.
| lysace wrote:
| Sure, but you are comparing 1981 Quantel Paintbox with 1996
| SGI Onyx2 - unless I misunderstood you.
| dylan604 wrote:
| yes, but it's all really friggin' old at this point, and
| just a part of the shit was really expensive back in the
| day.
| lysace wrote:
| I suppose it's a matter of perspective.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The old or the really expensive?
|
| I was at a color facility when DaVinci was bought by
| Black Magic. The software+hardware to run the old version
| was well over six figures, and the dongle for the
| software was the hardware as the software was useless
| without it. Then BMD released the software only
| version...for free and it was not useless. Getting the
| licensed version was $1k (which now comes free with other
| hardware purchases from BMD). So even if you trick out a
| system with multiple GPUs, you're maybe pushing four
| figures. The new system is pretty much resolution
| agnostic as long as you have the patience for it while
| the old systems were very much resolution limited.
|
| So yes, things are very much cheaper and more bang for
| that buck today. This is how the world works. For the
| people that spent all of that money, it was a very
| upsetting realization that the industry had become
| democratized where the cost of things was no longer a
| barrier to entry. They always cried over the money spent
| while ignoring how much money was made from it. It's just
| weird to see the olds crying over deprecated gear that
| still works but is absolutely useless in modern day.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| this was the kind of hardware that got me into VFX. However by
| the time I got there, the last vestiges of non-x86 based hardware
| were mostly banished.
|
| One of the oddities or interesting parts about paintbox and later
| systems (including harrys and henrys, they were in use right up
| until ~2010) is that they didn't have a "framestore" that is, you
| painted one image, saved it to tape, loaded in a new one etc etc.
| There was no real "local" storage for keeping frames, as the
| article pointed out.
|
| I had heard that there were disk based framestores, but I'd never
| seen one. There are a few people on mastodon that specialise in
| restoring Quantel kit like this.
|
| Ofcourse David Hockney used a piantbox to produce some bollocks,
| as he always does, but that doesn't do justice to the epic
| artistry that paintbox operators had.
| mrandish wrote:
| > they didn't have a "framestore" that is, you painted one
| image, saved it to tape, loaded in a new one etc etc. There was
| no real "local" storage for keeping frames, as the article
| pointed out.
|
| I think that was true for the early generations. The Paintbox
| only had memory for a foreground, background and alpha channel,
| so 2.5 frames at most. However, I recently watched a
| demonstration video for the Harriet which followed only a few
| years later and it said it could store 12.5 seconds of video to
| RAM - which would explain it's high price. The video showed
| recording video clips to this memory by simply playing them in
| real-time. It also mentioned being able to store up to 30
| seconds of video offline on a removable Winchester disk pack
| (although I'm sure transferring video frames to that over SCSI
| required quite a while).
| dylan604 wrote:
| We were just chatting about this kind of equipment yesterday. The
| equipment for old SD post houses were so expensive, and now hold
| pretty much no value, even as scrap. From Paintbox to Henry to
| ADO to CMX edit suites to tape decks and even Chyrons that are
| now just boat anchors and door stops. The old DaVinci Gold
| systems in their racks of equipment capable of SD/HD replaced by
| a couple of GPUs in a desktop that are pretty much unrestricted
| resolution.
| mrandish wrote:
| > are now just boat anchors and door stops.
|
| This systems could go from Luxury Yacht to Anchor shockingly
| fast. I visited Broadway Video in NY (a very high-end post
| house) in the later 90s and they had a disconnected Quantel
| Mirage (~$750,000) literally propping a door open.
|
| The earliest systems had such astronomical prices because they
| were based on huge amounts of discrete components and they knew
| the lifetime sales would likely only range from a few dozen to
| hundreds of units. The original Paintbox only had a 68000 CPU
| yet had to handle mixing two full frame composite video images
| with alpha channels at 60fps with 1 FPS UI lag. That required
| dedicated hardware to achieve most of its functions. I doubt
| the CPU ever touched the actual video data in most operations.
| The hardware processing pipelines in video effects systems of
| this era usually digitized, processed and manipulated video in
| its native YUV or YIQ encoding. Decoding to RGB would have been
| very costly, even more bandwidth and memory intensive - and
| rather pointless since general purpose CPUs couldn't work
| nearly fast enough to process it in real-time.
|
| Reading patents from the high-end broadcast video effect
| systems of the 1980s is eye-opening. I was blown away by the
| 1981 Ampex ADO patent.
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US4472732/en
|
| In the late 1970s these studs made discrete hardware to remap
| live video sources onto almost arbitrary quadrilaterals with
| alpha channel, light sourcing and shadows in _real-time_. This
| was basically implementing GPU texturing and lighting functions
| out of Atari 2600 era 74LS-type logic. The designs had to use
| decadent amounts of the fastest static RAM available to cache
| and buffer every line of video, and even then only barely kept
| up. It 's no wonder these crazy racks of gear could cost upward
| of a million dollars. Yet by 1990 the march of Moore's Law
| would allow clever designers to achieve similar effects with
| the Video Toaster, a sub-$2000 add-in card for an Amiga. The
| Toaster won an Emmy award for technical achievement and
| unleashed the real-time desktop video revolution which put this
| kind of tech in everyone's hands.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Fun fact story about the ADO and using it in ways not
| expected. This was a piece of equipment that post houses
| could charge $250-$500/hr for use. In the bad old days of
| analog tape-to-tape editing, it was possible to have a piece
| of gear setup incorrectly with the rest of the equipment in
| the shop. This issue would cause the color burst to flip when
| the signal was used as a source, and when the edited tape was
| played back the flip would happen twice--once at the start
| and again at the end of the edit--you could see the flips
| happen on the waveform. This flipping was worth of a fine
| from the FCC for any broadcaster that dared to air this. Some
| enterprising person realized that if you ran the signal
| through the ADO while using none of its designed features,
| the output signal would be corrected to no longer have the
| flipping burst issue. This was all analog, so a generation
| hit was taken just to fix the issue.
|
| There was a very recent post about someone restoring an Amiga
| 1000 that had me reminiscing about my days with an Amiga 2000
| with a video toaster. I commented there about how that device
| replacing all of the existing gear was how I decided what
| career path I was taking. Maybe that shell shock of new
| replacing old at a young age allowed me to accept old
| equipment being no longer of any value where the older
| coworkers just had not had to accept that just yet.
| mrandish wrote:
| > ran the signal through the ADO while using none of its
| designed features
|
| So, basically using an esoteric multi-hundred thousand
| dollar piece of gear as a time base corrector. Cool. I
| recall abusing gear in similar ways back in the day!
| dylan604 wrote:
| exactly, only for some reason they said a TBC would not
| make the correction. in a same but different fashion,
| passing a source with Macrovision through a TBC would
| just pass the Macrovision. Running the source with
| Macrovision through a standards converter without
| converting the standard would remove the Macrovision.
|
| when I was first starting, I would spend down time
| patching/routing the output of one thing into the input
| of another thing just to look at what the signal looked
| like before/after. that hacker ethos reveals itself in
| many forms
| mrandish wrote:
| > only for some reason they said a TBC would not make the
| correction
|
| Hmmm, maybe the TBC was just re-timing the sync but the
| ADO was fully stripping and regenerating everything
| outside the active picture area. A lot of early TBCs only
| had 8 or 16 lines of memory, whereas the ADO had to have
| had a full frame store.
|
| > I would spend down time patching/routing the output of
| one thing into the input of another
|
| Brings to mind a story. My first exposure to any real
| gear was at a tiny video studio that only had minimal
| older gear to make industrial quality stuff on 3/4" tape.
| Late one night when no one was around, I disconnected the
| main production switcher and re-wired it into a different
| configuration using our bottom-of-the-line Chyron VP-1 as
| a full frame graphics generator. The VP-1 was only a very
| basic lower-third generator. It was "cheap" because it
| had no interface at all, just an RS-232 port and the user
| had to supply a separate computer to send it text strings
| with simple formatting codes for font, color and spacing.
| Basically, like a Hayes modem for titling (ATDT "Co-
| Starring"). Being the "computer guy", I got the
| assignment of writing our titling software using a Kaypro
| CP/M machine to send codes.
|
| Since I'd written the software, it was easy to change it
| to generate strangely formatted stuff that still complied
| with the API. So that night I formatted a "lower-third"
| that started at the top of the screen and filled every
| line with maximum font-sized periods with zero kerning
| and zero line spacing. Because I chose a font where the
| period symbol was square, it filled the screen with a
| solid color. Modifying some of the lines to change
| certain period dots to have a foreground color of
| {transparent}, I was able to cut two side-by-side squares
| out of the center of the solid colored frame. Making the
| background color of the transparent period dots black,
| gave these inset squares soft-edged black drop shadows
| over the color field. Adding a one period-wide border to
| each square in an alternate foreground color was then a
| simple addition.
|
| I wired the switcher to make this a final layer with two
| cut-out windows to whatever was underneath. I then fired
| up two studio cameras and framed up distinct shots in
| each. Using the switcher's effect buss I set up a
| vertical wipe splitting the screen between the two
| cameras. The overlaid Chyron graphic covered the split
| line and I carefully framed each camera to compose a nice
| shot. Finally, I added a text title centered underneath
| each inset square. And recorded the final output before
| unhooking everything and re-wiring back to normal
| operation.
|
| The next day everyone was mystified when I showed them
| the recorded shot because I'd made something that looked
| exactly like a high-end network dual squeeze box digital
| effect with multiple busses of keyed graphics (in those
| days, shadows required a separate buss). All in a studio
| that had no ability to generate any graphics or any way
| to digitally reposition video. By rewiring components in
| odd ways and abusing various functionality it was
| possible to get some really interesting and unexpected
| results. Good times... :-)
| dylan604 wrote:
| I think I've found my doppelganger. I always tried to use
| the low end gear that I had access to but in a way that
| made it look like I had access to better gear. Then, when
| I had access to good equipment, I wasn't afraid to trying
| things just because. Also, it helped to not know the
| "right" way, and just find "a" way. The downstream keyer
| was fun to play with in that it was fun on what to send
| it.
| Wistar wrote:
| Positive Video, in Orinda, CA, was one of the first facilities in
| the U.S. to have a Paintbox. I think it arrived in late 1983.
| Roger Mocenigo was the artist who ran it. Our first big project
| with it was Atari's videodisc-based arcade game, Firefox.
|
| For a few evenings in 1984 or maybe 85, Jerry Garcia rented the
| whole place out and played on the Paintbox.
|
| We were also one of the first facilities to have a Quantel
| Mirage. We hired a math guru out of Berkeley, Eddie Elliot, to
| program the Mirage (Pascal). Jerry Garcia rented that, too. He
| had a bunch of analog graphics created on an Aurora system that
| he wanted to run through the Mirage.
| sherr wrote:
| Great story. Halcyon days. Was Garcia playing on the kit for a
| purpose or just fun? Did he create anything that was seen
| anywhere?
| Wistar wrote:
| He was fairly tight-lipped about the exact purpose of the
| psychedelic footage (Aurora run through Mirage). We guessed
| it was intended for live performance backgrounds but we never
| knew for sure. I do know it cost a small fortune as the edit
| suite with Mirage was at least $800/hr and perhaps more.
| Garcia booked it for several hours nightly for about 10 days
| or so.
|
| His Paintbox stuff appeared to be just to play around with
| the system. He'd show up with a portfolio of sketches on
| paper and disappear into the Paintbox suite for an hour or so
| at a time. His manager, a hard-nosed guy, would sweep the
| place to make certain no remnants or artifacts remained in
| our hands after the sessions.
| Lammy wrote:
| Neat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjRcruWEedU
| Wistar wrote:
| Wow! What a relic! That video pre-dates me. By the time I got
| there in 1984, they had added an ADO. Not too long after that
| came the Quantel Mirage and a short time later a Bosch
| Telecine, (although the telecine had been delayed many months
| by a lawsuit over the color correction technology by a guy
| named Armand Sarabia of CCC). The telecine is where Lucasfilm
| transferred The Adventures of Andre & Wally B, the first CGI
| to feature motion blur.
|
| One night at about 3am a fist-fight between client guests
| broke out in the sunken client area in front of the edit
| suite console. A Jefferson Starship music video was being
| edited. Fun times.
| glxxyz wrote:
| The BBC filmed a few artists trying it out in 1987, which was
| probably how a lot of the public first heard of it:
| https://youtu.be/ZI8RbdPe4ro
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-31 23:01 UTC)