How Did they make TV Graphics in the 80's & 90's? Meet the Quantel Paintbox | Retro Road Trip
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- čas přidán 20. 02. 2019
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The power of modern computers means we take tasks like video captions and effects for granted these days, but how did intro graphics, credits, overlays and other art assets get made digitally in the 80's and 90's? Today we find out about the Quantel Paintbox workstations, made for just such tasks.
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Ooh Ahh Cantona. Thanks for joining Mark and I on this road trip. Audio was a challenge on this video it was like trying to film in a server room with all the fans going on these machines but hopefully you enjoyed it as much as I did, these are fascinating machines. A more heavily audio processed version can be found here if you need it: czcams.com/video/9pMApGvPfNE/video.html
And don't forget to check Marks channel out here to find out a lot more about these devices and more: czcams.com/users/dexterslab2013
Neil - RMC
Protip: get a dual-transmitter wireless lav kit: www.amazon.co.uk/saramonic-uwmic9-tx9-RX9-Wireless-Microphone-System-Black/dp/B01J3NXMB8/ref=pd_aw_lpo_267_tr_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=72DQ3DWZ2K0V48JHSSG1
If the lavs that come in the kit still gather the surroundings, get better cardioid-pattern lavs from Rode, Shure or Sennheiser.
Thanks @@unverifiedbiotic- An audio upgrade is the next target over on Patreon, we're nearly there now, £379 isn't an impulse purchase unfortunately but hopefully soon I can add that to the arsenal
czcams.com/users/PaintboxRestoration. BTW Why didn't Quantel not use PowerPC processors instead of the MC68040?
The PowerPC is not hardware compatible with the 68k and don't forget speed of the cpu was not a huge issue because they had all the custom hardware to accelerate the painting.
I wanted one of these as a kid, ever since I saw Kenny Everett talk about them on his TV show. Sadly, it was never going to happen on my pocket money!
Wow! Deja Vu. This brings back some fond memories. I was a Paintbox artist in the late 80s-to mid 90s I worked on the big brown unit at a local NBC news affiliate doing news and weathers graphics. It was amazing. All the software was hard coded right into the ROM chips which made it blazingly fast. Back then, this big brown box cost somewhere around $150k. Not a price the average artist could afford to have one at home. The pen on this unit had a cord connected to it which plugged into the box but that didn't prevent anyone from creating amazing graphics. There was flaw in its' zoom function. You could zoom into a small sections of an image but when you zoomed back to 100% the whole image became softened or blurred slightly. Zooming in and out multiple times on an image would eventually blur the image to a point that it was unusable. There was no panning around on a zoomed image either like Photoshop.
Later, starting in 1990, I was hired by a national cable network and worked the V Series box. The pen was cordless and the zoom flaw was gone. I created dozens of popular show graphic title opens and promos for the network. I was desperate to get my hands on a Quantel Harriet but the studio never got one for me.
It's important to note that the burnout rate for Paintbox artists was high. The networks pushed very hard to crank out graphics at a very fast rate. In an average 11pm newscast I would create upwards of 15 to 20 news graphics in about 2 hours before the show every night. Eventually i got carpal tunnel in my wrist from tapping and swiping on that menu for 8 hours straight every day. It got to be very painful so I had to quit.
Those were the days.
Looking back, one of the reasons Paintbox failed to become the mainstream graphics tool like Photoshop is that it was a closed system. The paintbox program was ROM hard coded onto the chips. Not software that was loaded and interpreted by a cpu to preform various functions. What made Photoshop unique was that you could expand its' functions by adding third-party plugins. There was no way of doing this with Paintbox at all and that's the way Quantel wanted it to be. Third party plugins opened a whole new world of innovative features and functions and launched an explosion of software companies around the world. Many of those companies were bought by Adobe and their software was permanently incorporated into Photoshop. And the rest is history.
Thank you for sharing your experience. This was a great add-on to the video.
And you can now use your $1,000 phone to do the same today. Times have changed.
@@NyuuMikuru1 Forget $1,000 , you can do this on pretty much any smartphone for the most part.
@dstmars1, could you place a drawing on the drawing pad in order to help you creating the art?
@@nejiniisan1265 That didn't work very well. There were no scanners back then. The best way to get artwork into the Paintbox was to use a video camera mounted on an animation stand which was pointed down looking at the artwork, then use the video capture feature in the Paintbox to capture a frame of video. I could draw a rough sketch of something on paper and then video capture the sketch into the Paintbox and then use that as a guide to create my finished art.
Having a live camera feed into the Paintbox made the creative possibilities endless. You could video capture anything including photos and objects of any kind. Capture you own hand holding a pen or brush and then animate it moving in the Paintbox. or torn paper effects or patterns. I had a book full of random patterns that I used quiet often.
So great to see the Paintbox again! I was a Paintbox artist at Star TV in Hong Kong in the early 90's. Real workhorses. My favourite prank was to screen grab that menu at the bottom and make it a cutout. When the next shift came in the menu would stick to the end of his pen. Happy memories.
If, like me, you remember these being the holy grail of graphics and computers, consider this:
From the very first stored program electronic computer (1943) to 1981 when this machine was first made is 38 years.
From when this machine was made to now (2019) is 38 years...
Good thinking...
I created. the animation sequences for, 'Murder on the Moon' back in the 80s on an Amiga. Good fun!
That's so cool! I will check it out and say that I know the lady who did this lol
Just a stock Amiga?
What were the specs?
Or was it a fully specced Video Toaster?
"lady"
@@iansloan7673 It was a stock 512MB Amiga. I created the graphics using D_paint and the way we did it was simple.
Rob Dickinson pointed his camera directly at the screen and recorded it while I animated. Well, it was 1989!
The Amiga had a peripheral device for Genlock that synced the computer's signal with a standard videotape signal. This enabled the user to create TV graphics. It was pretty sophisticated for the 1980s and a lot more cost-effective than a Paintbox.
I worked with a Quantel Paintbox in the 90s for a few TV shows like XFiles and Sliders. I think I may have some brochures and a manual around. I know the unit we had at the time cost close to million or so dollars but that may have also added in the cost of the disk recorder and the D1 video deck. I believe it was a Harry.
I used to work for a company comprised of quite a few Ex Quantel employees. I heard stories of the Private planes, the helicopter, and the crazy things put on expenses. The early Paintboxes were held together with ribbon cable, and there is a decent documentary floating about which covers the BBC series 'Tripods'. It explains that they had to borrow the Paintbox from BBC weather and use it in the evenings to composite the model shots with the live action. It's this kind of thing which keeps me enthusiastic about my job.
Thank you to RetroManCave for taking the time to visit, learn about these rare machines and make this awesome video, Paintboxes are all unsung heroes of video / tv production and almost nearly forgotten!
Great work saving these machines from the trash and keeping them working for people to experience today! Any ideas how many were sold and how many are known to survive today? I'm guessing there's unlikely to be an owners club! Did Quantel only make for PAL countries? Did you find low level technical information on them or are you having to figure everything out from scratch? Did they only use off the shelf parts or are there custom ASICs all over the place? I could ask questions about these amazing relics of the past all day long. Will definitely check out your channel. Thank you both for collaborating, allowing me to rediscover and enjoy seeing them in action again.
@@TheDigitalOrphanage Quantel made all their systems available worldwide, the DPB-7000 certainly was low volume due to their cost. The later v-series machines were far more popular and probably sold in the 1000s.
When i first started looking at the Paintbox i had no info to go from so was learning from scratch, since then i am now in contact with several ex-Quantel engineers who have been a great help in filling in bits of information and finding technical details. I do have service manuals for the DPB-7000 and 'Harry' but for the later machines the inner technical detail was kept company confidential by Quantel.
The DPB-7000 was nearly all off the shelf parts with only a couple of custom programmed ICs. The later systems made extensive use of programmed CPLDs, FPGAs and custom ASICs.
It's hard to know how many still exist, i am not aware of any other DPB-7000. I do know of about 7 other working v-series machines. I am sure there are quite a few out there, probably in need of repair!
Ask as many questions as you like, i'll try my best to answer.
@CyDragonGM Just had a look at a couple of the MMPR intros and yes the Harriet could do most of those effects as short sequences. I did spot a few effects that you'd probably need one of the more powerful machines, which for the time might have been the Henry or HAL systems.
@@DextersTechLab All that custom silicon in the later models must make working on them quite a worry, not knowing whether you'll be able to get a part if you break something. I'm guessing the power draw must be quite high too. Hopefully the more exposure you and your channel get, the more donations you'll be offered. Any chance of opening a museum, or teaming up with another computer museum? They look fascinating and I had to stop myself buying one on ebay, I'm not sure my wife would approve of me re-homing one of these orphans into my digital orphanage!
@@TheDigitalOrphanage Yes the custom parts could be an issue, but i have not seen any failures of them in my machines and i do have a supply of spare cards thankfully. I would love to see the DPB-7000 working for the 40th anniversary of it's launch in 2021. If working i had always planned on at least loaning it to one of the computer museums for people to see. If you really are after a Paintbox contact me directly, i don't have any for sale but i can give advice.
I remember hearing about Paintbox when I took a 3D animation (3D Studio) course back in 94. All I can really remember is them talking about how expensive it was and how nearly all the graphics seen on TV were built with it. This was a fascinating trip through some very obscure digital tech history. Bravo to Mark for hanging onto these things. I can imagine that the vast majority of these units ended up in a dust bin somewhere.
I would have paid arm and leg for 3D Studio course in 1994. :D Did you use 3D Studio (DOS) in work after that?
Mika Korhonen Did pay a fair amount then. Not sure what the arm/leg exchange rate is for that year. Unfortunately, no. There’s not much call for that kind of work where I live that didn’t require 5+yrs of exp. Job placement at the school consisted of “Hey, Burger King is hiring!”
@@MrVolksbeetle Thanks for answering. I could not use DOS version on our first PC, because it did not have "math" processor. Self learned by trial and error 1996->. 2008 Got change to study media technology and I chose engineering line that used 3ds MAX. Price for that was my lungs, got asthma, so had to study something new.
Mika Korhonen Tragic. Life is pretty difficult without lungs, sadly.
I was very lucky self taught myself 3D studio for DOS at 16 in 1996 on my Pentium thanks to a free bootleg copy. I am still proud of the animation I achieved with zero instruction manual or help. Pity I couldn't show my teachers what I had done. One animation took 10 floppies. I still wonder if I could have done it professionally.
in the Red Dwarf episode 'D.N.A,' Kryten asks lister about how to use his eye after being turned into a human
"And what about the other optical effects, split screen, slow motion, Quantel?"
I was trying to think where I heard Quantel, totally forgot about Red Dwarf. I'm a total Polaroid Head!
@@retrogamer33 Single or double? :-D
@@RaveTracks No one should get a double polaroid when looking at appliances. :)
Geez you're a nerd
Bonus points for the Red dwarf mention
Another thing that amazes me is this stuff was so ubiquitous and yet so obscure. It's actually fairly scary when you think about it. Something right under your nose, shaping every thing you watch on TV, your very opinions no less, and you had no clue it existed xD
Thanks for the trip down memory lane, I supported these as a BBC News engineer at TVC. I went to Quantel to take the DLS6001 still store course as we had those as well and the architecture was very similar. We did have one of those very very expensive 68000 CPUs catch fire on a machine down at Lime Grove. My memory, which is probably faulty was that the Fujitsu Hard Drives were only 150MB. They were incredibly heavy and were installed at the bottom of a 19 rack mount equipment bay. The item that probably caused the most problems was the wired graphics pen. I was called to have a look at an ailing pen by one of our designers, when I was not that familiar with the system. 'Looks OK to me' I said as I swiped it across the screen a couple of times. The designer was distinctly not happy, it was a live project she was working on, not saved and no undo! We still use Quantel Q-Edits as part of our video editing process. Unfortunately I no longer have my course notes, somewhere in a landfill with the rest of the rubble from Stage IV TVC.
A Quantel Paintboxes was used to make the album cover for Queen's "The Miracle" in 1989.
Nirvanas Nevermind as well!
Not only was the machine impressive then. Its impressive even now. I wasn't expecting such smooth graphic animation.
I had the Amiga kit that was used for the graphics in the TV show Knightmare! I still have my Screen Machine ][ (Chromakey video overlay), the actual PowerMac 6400 used to create the St Patricks day Guinness advert and I also have a Radius Spigot. Perhaps I should make a video or two!
I guess my point is that without using these devices it is difficult to appreciate just how convenient and accessible digital image manipulation is now - snap chat filters and the like on every smart phone, people rarely give the history of this technology a second thought!
_The Paintbox_ logo almost looks like an _Intel Inside_ logo 🤔
Exactly what I thought!
Same thought here!
Same
Looks like a lawsuit in the making.
Possibly Intel bought Quantel?
256mb of Ram back in 86!! that is seriously impressive stuff. I'm blown away! and its British :0)
1/4 GB of static RAM. Amazing.
@@djmips I strongly doubt it would have been static SRAM, that much memory would surely have been dynamic DRAM. And it would have needed even more circuitry to refresh all that DRAM too.
@@UrbanOzzy Relative to those days, it'd be like having access to a 32TB RAM machine in 2019
My phone had 256 mb of ram in 2012 lol
I had 16 MB RAM in my PC from 1996, first gen Pentium 150MHz.
This is amazing! I was involved in the production of a show on our local public access TV channel in the early 90s, so the (in-)famous Paintbox was definitely something I heard of quite often. However, until now I had never actually seen (let alone touched or even used) one.
With Avid products becoming more and more popular (in particular due to their primary show case TV show "Home Improvement") in the mid- and late-90s and pushing the Paintbox out of many markets and Adobe Premiere eventually canibalising Avid's market, the Paintbox is mostly forgotten these days - except for very few enthusiasts. So I was surely not expecting to ever see one of these guys in action.
Thanks again!
Wasnt "Home Improvement" done 100% on Amiga tho? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewTek
Great video. I was using one of these back in the mid 2000’s for a client who did not want to move to a more modern solution. The Paintbox was a Harriet, and was at least tens years old by that point, if not older. The cursor movements were so smooth thanks to the hardware. Great machine.
Thanks for taking me down memory lane. I worked for MicroConsultants-Quantel in Newbury from 1980-1985, my first job after university. I was one of the few programmers in the company of amazing electronics engineers. I remember the company using a professional artist as a consultant for the Paintbox, to guide them in how it could be used since, being electronics engineers, painting wasn't really their strong point. In those days, the actual electronics design was all done with paper and pen. The master circuit design was done on a drawing board in the middle of the shop floor. It's amazing to think about that now.
The company was truly innovative. Another guy hired at the same time as me was looking at the potential application of the company's video framestores for robotics, for example, for automatic image recognition. This was in 1980!
The fact that the 'rat' had similarities with an aviation control was probably because the company's founder, Peter Michael, was a keen pilot.
Photoshop is dead to me now... Now I know that photoshop is just the console version of the arcade machine :*(
As far as user interface goes, PS lifted far more heavily from EA's Deluxe Paint in my opinion... and Corel Draw beat Adobe to the market by about a year, so PS just managed to perfect it.
Dirty Photoshop-using peasants messing things up for the glorious Quantel graphics master race, lol.
@@JohnMichaelson Americans invented te technology first, the guy in the video said to himself.
The only true photo/video manipulation is done in a darkroom or with paint and films. Come on.
Very eloquently put, my friend. The (poorly done) flicker-plagued Atari 2600 port of a real state-of-the-art arcade machine.
Cool device. It's amazing how advanced the professional stuff was back in the day.
And it was largely going to waste producing weather graphics. The machines at the BBC used for weather were taken over at night time to produce the special FX for the Tripods TV series.
@@6581punk and they were also used for all the captions on Grandstand. John McCririck told on a documentary about how he used to have to run sheets of paper containing scores and race cards to the Weather Centre for them to do the captions.
I'm like if only I've knew such versatile machine existed, but back then you've needed
a tight channel of information beyond consumer computer magazine at all if you could manage to get one.
@@will9357 you could buy 3 houses (average selling price around 40 thousand) - or a whole street of mining cottages in the north east for the price of one of the early 80's machines
Mark is truly doing the Lord's work. I remember seeing a special on the making of Star Trek: TNG, and they kept talking about how awesome the Quantel Harry was!
Thanks, i never knew they used a Harry on TNG!
@@DextersTechLab Like a lot of US TV shows, TNG was shot on film, (along with all the model shots) because they had far better picture clarity than standard definition NTSC video, and because (being made in Hollywood) film camera equipment was easy to hire, and film processing was cheap. Editing, however, was a different story. All the shots were telecined onto video, to cut together. To aid the process, almost all of the video effects were done using the Quantel system. So, any phaser fire, recolouring of models, etc were done on a Quantel.
Of course, this posed a massive problem when it came to releasing TNG in High Definition. All the edits, along with all the video effects only existed on standard definition videotape. After scanning the film elements in HD, all the edits and video effects had to be recreated from scratch, - essentially reproducing the entire post production process. This is in contrast to the HD version of the original Star Trek, where they were dealing with completed productions and could have released those as they were (in the end, they chose to redo all the effects digitally, as alternate versions).
The extra expense of producing HD versions of TNG is also a contributing factor as to why they haven't done HD versions of Deep Space Nine and Voyager. This is compounded by the fact that on those shows, in many of the later seasons the effects were partially CG, were only rendered in standard definition and no longer exist as separate elements. If you wanted to release an HD version, you'd literally have to remake those sequences from scratch (every mortifying effect for Odo, for example).
Paramount made the same mistake with the Director's cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as the replacement shots in that were only done in standard definition for a DVD release.
And if you think THAT'S bad... Babylon 5's live action sequences were all shot in widescreen-safe 16:9, on Super 16mm film. Meaning, that future home release, or repeat transmissions could be in widescreen HD without the film crew or equipment being on the edges of the frame (unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was framed for 4:3, with the widescreen Blu-Ray showing exactly where the deficiencies lie in filming in this way - there are multiple shots where you can see crew, jibs, cranes, light stands etc on the edge of frame. In one episode, Buffy's vampire nemesis The Master, vanishes on her, leaving Buffy looking around in confusion for the source of his voice. Except, he's actually right at the side of the screen, out of the 4:3 frame, but still within the 16:9 frame, making Buffy look like she's just really short-sighted).
Unfortunately, in Babylon 5's case, the entirety of the effects shots were achieved using Lightwave on Amiga computers, and rendered in 4:3 at standard definition. Ron Thornton offered to render in wide-screen at a higher definition at the time - future-proofing the CG - but this was turned down for cost reasons. So, a future HD release would need to have all the effects shots redone from scratch across five seasons and several TV movies at huge expense.
This takes me back, I used the Quantel Paintbox from 1992 onwards, along with the HAL, Micro Henry and I still have an EditBox. Which I should really make a video of someday.
Haha I worked for Snell (who Quantel ultimately merged with) around 10 years ago on their hardware picture scalers for broadcast. Those high end broadcast systems can still be beasts in terms of being the latest custom technology. This was a great video, I remember the Quantel Paintbox apparently being used for all the funky Top of the Pops graphics in the 80's.
I'm an ex Pro-Bel lad, I assume you're ex S&W?
Wow, that's a very interesting piece of hardware!
I remember myself watching TV in the 80's and always wondered how the broadcasting channels could produce those graphics... Even though they look "crude" compared to today's graphic quality standards, they have the charm of those early days.
Watching this machine working is a real joy! And also thanks for all the information and the video!
We were fortunate to have a Quantel Harriet at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Scotland whilst I was studying there in 1994. I loved using it, it was an amazing system to get access to especially as a student. The postgraduate course produced quite a lot of students who went on to great success in post production companies like The Mill in London.
I always drooled after one ......seeing David Hockney painting on it....it was a revelation. Maybe one day I will still own one? :) It is like Dpaint and Autodesk Animator rolled into one. Very unique. Amazing all those colours it could do at the time!
Wow, look at that beautiful PaintBox Classic! The tablet for that was huge - bigger than the later tablets. It was formica, built on a slanted wooden frame and the pen was attached - not wireless (that came later). I worked on the Classic at a company called Ceasar Video Graphics in New York City that was cutting edge at the time. Great memories! We had several V-series at MTV before we got the Harriet. Those wireless pens were over $100. I always wanted one engraved with my name! :D
Very nice high end equipment! Those graphics accelerator cards are total beasts! The real time graphics and 3D editing on that 1996 is even impressive today - and it is running on a 68040! Thanks for the video.
I went to the Quantel factory in Newbury back in the early 90s when I was a student... It was like a glimpse of the future for a kid who'd spent the previous 3 years working on Apple Macs.
In the mid 90s I was working for an Avid reseller (first job) and Quantel was whispered about in the halls like a legend. I and many colleagues never got to see it live in action. This was a really cool video and brings back memories.
I used some Quantel paintboxes while I was at the BBC in the 1990's, in the news graphics department. It was interesting to use and to see it's use behind the scenes to make weather maps for the presenter we'd see on TV.
That's so cool to see. In the 80s I was coding graphics tools for the 8-bit Ataris in 6502 assembler (Mac/65!) and Action!. I remember reading about the Quantel boxes in those nerdy computer magazines we'd had back then and being utterly thrilled by what they were bringing to the table. I wrote some routines that would take a bitmap image and transform it in various ways, like rolling it into a tube, morph it into a sphere, rotate, twist and skew it around to your heart's content. And even though I was actually rather proud about the highly optimised code (using every dirty trick in the bag, like undocumented mnemonics and more) the routines were of course still incredibly slow when compared to this stuff. For the longest time I had not idea just how slow! Those Quantel boxes were full of promise and I remember the first animated graphics that were done with Quantel products appearing on German telly stations. Never had the chance to get near one, though. Still. This brings back great memories of very different times. Great job and thanks a bunch!
Two of my favourite CZcamsrs (and people) demonstrating some of my favourite historic hardware. Couldn't ask for more.
Great job, guys. ;)
Thanks Ash mate, glad you enjoyed it
Thanks Ash! Some credit goes to you for sending me that broken one, i wouldn't have ended up here without it.
Those were good times.
@@DextersTechLab Did you get the original unit fully working?
@@TheEPROM9 i did yes, it went to a new home in Portland, Oregon!
I really enjoyed this video - Quantel were a company based at Turnpike Road in Newbury, Berkshire, UK - where i lived and grew up. So i am very familiar with QUANTEL. My secondary school (Turnpike school) was a 5 minute walk away from Quantel's building and back in about 1987-88, Quantel loaned a paintbox system to the art department for a while and i was able to experience the paintbox system first hand. Considering the home computers were not really around at the time, using the paintbox at that time was like being put incharge of a magic box - knowing what it could do - having seen the stuff it could do on TV - but alas i was only aloud to riddle with it during lunch hours. A couple of years later in around 1991 - i also remember going to Quantel for a general public open evening and having a guided tour of the company.
Christ-on-a-bike, the amount of chips on that ramcorder board - its insane!
I know and consider that with that many chips to get the reliability from so many units, probably a very good number of them would be redundant D:
In the early 80s, when I was at college, we all used to dream of owning a Quantel Paintbox.... once Deluxe Paint came out, it was almost like a dream come true.
I love his "All your Paintbox are belong to us" T-Shirt... and, I s'pose, in his case, that is true... All the paintbox do belong to him.
The cpu/ram/disk side of that late 80s model has the power of "my" enormous business machine from about the same time that was the size of a fridge-freezer.
It was mentioned on Swedish television back in the late '80s but I never knew what the thing really was. They had an artist that drew original freehand art on it to illustrate court cases and the like: Those had a very distinct style, owing to the painting tools on the Paintbox
Love hearing about cool computers I didn't even know existed!!!
When the dark glasses come out and the synth guitars play, we all know it's time for something special. Great video Neil!
I remember Quantel Paintbox from my early days of working at HTV (ITV Wales) in the 80s. Our graphics department boss loved it but the hand artists weren't so sure!
I wouldn't doubt they would be hesitated to use it, let alone see their jobs sacked by a new medium.
An interesting example of how a company can be so stable, so invaluable, a central player in a multi billion dollar industry, and a few years later be all but forgotten, an obscure footnote in history.
In middle school for me in around 1994 our school had a system for students to do news programs for our school, since every room had a tv. But the system they used often required you to code different designs and effects, it had some pre-made designs for overlays, I am sure they had a input capability but we were never given any chances to create our own artwork by hand! Our system base looked much like a sound mixer where you could select effects and apply them in real time, but there was a rack that was connected as well that housed the main system, I know the system had been donated by a local news at the time since they had upgraded, but it still worked.
We actually had to take a class that involved us in that as well as photography and a few other things, it was often quite boring but a few fellow students who liked it back then are involved in the local news back in Indiana even today an experience they must have enjoyed, since they once provided us with daily school news and reports, though I no longer live there.
Most schools in the US in the mid 1990's didn't equip all classrooms with tv's however our middle school at the time was newly constructed and had been claimed to be one of the most advanced in Northern Indiana. The high school was slightly older, but was also just as advanced with classroom tv's in every room, student made news broadcasts daily and both schools had mainframes that could be used to provide daily instructions and advertisements/reminders as well as rack mounted video equipment including vcr's and satellite tv that could be used separately for or by each class!
It is just amazing to see in these days that most graphical effects are simply software based and require limited amounts of hardware for content creators like you to apply in their videos, compared to the ancient old equipment of yester year!
Thanks for a cracking trip down memory lane. Used these in the 80's and 90's at ITN and BBC News. Such a time of innovation. Amazing what we could knock together with a Paintbox, Questech Charisma and Abekas 64 disc recorder. The subsidised bar helped a lot too.
It's responsible for much pain in my life. I had that very machine in the video in my house for about 2 years, trying to fix, I gave that thing to him lol. Many videos with it in on my channel :o)
Shameless plug, but I'll take a look 😉
@@krashd With CZcams these days can you blame him.
The Weather Channel in the United States had one of the first Quantel Paint Boxes, so it is said. I worked for TWC back when it had a QPB, it was a wonderful machine. You could paint as fast as you could on the bitpad with the pen with an airbrush and it would keep up with the input. Someone I worked with said it had a custom MC68000, but it likely had a MC68000 interfaced to a fast FIFO on the data pins. Amazing machine.
There was a Winter Olympics in 1972 (Japan) and 1976 (Austria). So either of those for first use of Paintbox. They appear to be definitely using it by the 1980 Winter Olympics in America.
Comedian Dana Carvey's brother Brad Carvey developed the Video Toaster, In fact Dana's character of Wayne's friend Garth in the Wayne's World sketches and film was based on Brad.
Yes, in one scene in Wayne's World there is a Video Toaster board (not in a computer), just sitting on a table as the camera pans over it.
I believe that is the most obscure (and awesome) bit of trivia I've ever read. How the hell did you come to know this? LOL.
That was my favorite video you’ve made yet. What a fantastic history lesson on a niche area of early computing. Thank you so much for what you do!
You're welcome Will thank you for watching it
Fun fact: after TNG, Will Wheaton became a product evangelist for Video Toaster
My old school was just down the road from Quantal, so we had a fully kitted out unit on loan from them in the early 90's. It was pretty awesome to use.
Wow. I knew a little about the Quantel systems as the local Technical College had one that had been donated in the early 1990s, and one of my brother's friends went on from a media course there to working on a later Quantel system for BSkyB. I hadn't realised how much custom hardware was involved though. Wondering if the operating system completely specific to the Quantel, or whether they used something like a Unix derivative. As it was probably a single tasking system I'm guessing it's a completely in house developed OS!
13:30: A 256 MB RAM card in 1988 oO. I love these corner case 'super devices', built for purposes where result overweighs investment cost.
Look at the size of that thing and the amount of memory chips. Seems like it's 1 mb per chip or so :O
Quite an advanced piece of technology for the time period.
Aaah! I've heard of the Paintbox before, but I was always mystified by it somewhat, because when I read myself into it, there wasn't much about how they work. I've seen some of the stuff that was created with one of those machines for TV productions and was always baffled that computers in the 80s were able to just pull that off. Taking still images of an analogue video feed and manipulating it all digitally, but then it did come with a price tag. Thanks for the video :)
Great video. Cool to see this equipment working after all these years. I recall seeing the Quantel Paintbox Harry being demonstrated on Bad Influence! in 1992.
Wow I remember that hardware was stunning and Amiga developers wanted to offer some of this. Obviously toaster was the best of them but even that lacked real time 24bit paint.
crazy to think how advanced this was for the day, including the excellent sized and functionality of that art tablet. I'd kill for a tablet that big nowdays.
Quantel was an industry standard throughout the world with their Paintbox system. I remember watching TV specials about CGI in the 80's that often talked about it and it's use. Many American channels and other production outfits used it quite a lot. As a kid, I was impressed by what it could do and wanted to do it too. The Commidore Amiga came close to offering pro-level graphics at a fraction of the price.
I was the main designer, and subsequently team leader, of the Quantel Paintbox. I started work designing the processing cards in 1979, and prototype was developed in conjunction with an artist we hired, Martin Holbrook (RIP). The prototype was shown privately at the NBC exhibition in April 1981. The first production NTSC Paintbox (DPB 7000) I hand delivered to the Weather Channel in Atlanta. This model shown was, I believe, the first production PAL Paintbox (DPB 7001) delivered to the BBC in London and was in continuous use there for nearly 20 years. I managed or was involved in further developments of Paintbox and other products until I retired in 2016. Quantel has since ceased to be. Great video and great to see these early systems beautifully maintained. If you want any info to help you keep these units running, please contact me.
There's still a fascinating charm to the output these kinds of specialized machines produce, it's something that just can't be replicated on modern software quite as accurate.
Great video. Fantastic condition boards in the machines. Britain was at the cutting edge back in the day.
I never used a Paintbox, but in the 1990s, I used a Chyron MAX! for fonts during newscasts. It had almost as many cards as the Paintbox. As mentioned in your video, by the time the Paintbox Express came out, it was facing stiff competition from Mac and PC based graphic solutions like Photoshop that were a fraction of the cost and widely adapted by TV stations. Backgrounds and graphics designed with Photoshop could then be imported into the Chyron.
Brilliant interview - thanks for making and uploading!
I think the first time I heard about Paintbox was when the unfinished Doctor Who story 'Shada' was released on VHS, and remember reading that this powerful new technology (I guess something like the Harriet going by the dates) had been used to finish off the special effects. Interesting how even those brief demonstrations of Quantel in this video seemed very familiar, quickly bringing to mind all kinds of British TV from the period!
Most retro computing is fascinating, but I love the obscenely expensive-for-the-time stuff.
It's amazing what you can do for _free_ in 2019
With your cellphone lol
@@Tony32 OBS
This is something that is universally taken for granted. So much is now free for the taking and for the making. And yet it seems we are focused on things like filters and selfies.
and people prefer to watch memes and play shitty games
Nice "all your bases belong to us" t-shirt!
These are truly amazing pieces of engineering, waay ahead of time. That this could actually be built and working at all back in 1981 is borderline crazy.
I'd love a more in-depth look at the hardware, will probably have to bug Dexter about that. :)
My favourite episode by far so far. Retro broadcast stuff is a magical realm.
The pricing mentioned reminded me of the kind of market Discreet was targeting with its SGI-based IFFFS systems (Inferno, Flame, Flint, Fire and Smoke, and later Effect on O2); the Flint Indigo2 I have cost 100K when it was new in about 1995 (infact the PaintBox GUI reminded me of Flint, makes me wonder if Discreet nicked the look from Quantel). I can see where SGI was going with its O2 system, seems almost like a direct stab at Quantel in terms of capabilities (far more potent live broadcast effects), though the launch PR seemed to be poking more at Adobe, but although the O2 was much cheaper hw, it didn't bring down the total cost at all, bundle pricing was still very high, purely because it could be. In the end, SGI became a slave of Discreet, pandering to what the company wanted, all the while targeting a market that was inevitably going to move away from custom hw solutions (whether that was Quantel, SGI, E&S, etc.) towards commodity tech and sw solutions. I have several Flame/Smoke systems and an Inferno aswell, the pricing back then was through the roof, regardless of what the base hw actually cost.
I would be interested to know whether Quantel ever found itself becoming somewhat at the mercy of certain financially critical clients (eg. a particular large production company or TV studio), in a manner that made it difficult for them to consider adapting to new markets in a rational way, because that's what happened to SGI, though SGI made plenty of its own horrendous blunders aswell, systems with great potential like O2 allowed to go to waste.
At least they were trying new things back then though. Today's commodity tech just feels like the entire field has stagnated. Plus, no matter how powerful the hw, a particular media fad comes along and that dominates the artistic scene for a while anyway, eg. the way bullet time took over for some years, ie. we have fast commodity hw these days, but that's no guarantee that the created content has any artistic merit. :D Many tools are so automated, a lot of what we see has replaced artistic imagination. I saw some comments from people saying they wish modern sports broadcasts would use the kinds of disolves, fades, wipes, etc. that were popularised by the Toaster. Everything's gone so CGI mad, it's kinda funny that the actual programme content quality of mainstream media is now so bad. Whether it's RMC here or something entirely unrelated like blancolirio covering the Oroville Dam, an individual with talent and enthusiasm these days makes better and more engaging content than powerful media companies with expensive kit.
Wow , Been awhile since I seen so many Cards in a Box , a few IBM Military devices some years back , Thank the Lord for Curators and Computer Collectors
My Aunt used to work for Southern TV and I was treated to a trip around for my 13th birthday. I came back with some caption cards that were used in a caption generator, it hooked me on CG at an early age.
Great stuff, I've always been interested in the Quantel Paintbox systems. With them being super expensive professional equipment I knew I'd never have access to using one and could only marvel at the powerful dedicated hardware. I did get to see one in use at Granada studios in the late 80's though, I guess that must have been the v-series. I had to make do with a Genlock on the Amiga, even the video toaster was out of my price range back then.
I love this intro, you look so styling in those sunglasses and suit! This episode was super cool as a heavy photoshop/tablet user it was interesting to see and learn about something i didnt even know existed. It makes me wonder where things would be if Quantel had won their court case against Adobe. Awesome content as always =)
9:50 The zero wing all your bases are belong to us shirt 🤣🤣🤣
What a fantastic episode. The hardware solutions to early problems are nothing short of mind blowing. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor after seeing that working ramb board array. Thank you for sharing!
Fascinating to see how it was done in the olde days!
My company is sells TV playout software and TV CG software. It's nice to see such old hardware/software :)
is this how the Home Improvement intro was made? The age old question...
One famous use of the Quantel Paint Box was to produce the cover for Queen’s 1989 “The Miracle” album.
I remember seeing a TV program about the Paintbox and was amazed what it could do.
I was doing digital photo compositing on my Amiga 3000 in the '90s. I had people telling me that ImageFX wasn't an "industry standard interface" because it didn't look like Photoshop. Photoshop was barely into 3.0 at the time. I responded that ImageFX looks like the true industry standard, the Quantel Paintbox.
Great video! The whole range of Quantel products seems to be a fascinating subject, I have seen Mark's video on the Ramcorder as well, the engineering that went into these things is just amazing.
Thank you so much for sharing this! Of course from 1980 onwards Doctor Who heavily relied on Quantel, and I've always wanted to know more about what they were capable of. You hit the perfect sweet spot for me. Thanks
This is pretty impressive. Very usable, and actually fast with all the effects and so on. I was not expecting that.
Seeing all that NVRAM on a board... Holy cow!
Great guide on products I would never have thought to explore... Just listened to you on the podcast. Great work 😁
Thanks Robert great to have you here. The Retro Hour was a really fun chat
great episode! I used to work on Quantel Editbox and later systems at Swiss TV. Paintbox/Editbox had no UNDO function. When a Quantel rep was once asked why there was no undo, he replied that "a Quantel operator always knows what he is doing and would have no use for it." Wonderful...
@Tales from the Man Cave what a silly response 🤣🤣🤣, I'm sure they fixed that in later editions
I never worked with the PaintBox but with the EditBox. It was used for trailer editing, where you had to work with a lot of masks and keys ect. It was a nightmare to get used to it with a steep learning curve. I vividly remember a sales pitch from a Quantel rep, "But it is the Mercedes of all the editing systems" - true, a Mercedes also has no undo function.
All of them had a hard wired ISDN connection to Quantel in case they broke down. And they broke down a lot (Though unquestionably well engineered, very complex).
"Human resources" where the final nail in the coffin for Quantel. Finding someone willing to put up with their quirky UI and/or sending them to expensive training workshops was harder and harder as PC's where more up to the task.
great video this is awesome information. i loved seeing this episode the Paint Box pro brings back good memories . great channel . who ever has that collection is very lucky indeed .
DANG, I had no idea there were any Quantel Paintboxes still operational. It's phenomenal to be able to see them in action.
I recall that most of the digital effects for Star Trek: The Next Generation were done on paintboxes, so it's awesome to see what kind of hardware they used to produce my favorite show growing up.
Awesome! I love this stuff and anything video electronics releated.
I'm glad you mentioned the Video Toaster, that was my love back in the day. :)
Very cool to see this Paintbox demo
Thank you for keeping this stuff running.
They had some very beautiful logos and graphics on TV in the 80s. It would be interesting to interview an engineer for these devices.
This was great, thanks to you both.
The mask adding cloud around the building was very convincing (and impressive) , until you notice that the building was lit from the left, and the clouds from the right. :) Great video.
Brilliant episode (again). Thanks!