Quantel

Encyclopedia : Q : QU : QUA : Quantel

Quantel is a corporation based in the United Kingdom, and founded in 1973, that designs and manufactures digital production equipment for the broadcast television, video production, and motion picture industries. They are headquartered in Newbury, Berkshire.

The name Quantel comes from Quantised Television.

Quantel has made several pioneering firsts in video:

In 1975, they released the first all-digital framestore, the Quantel DFS 3000. It was first introduced in TV coverage of the 1976 Montreal Olympics to generate a picture-in-picture inset of the Olympics' flaming torch while the rest of the picture featured the runner entering the stadium.

In 1981, they released the Paintbox, an extremely advanced television graphics system for its time. Paintboxes are still in use today due to their image quality, and versatility. The Weather Channel was the first customer in the United States to purchase a Paintbox in 1982 (they had serial #1 in the USA), which was used to generate their on-air weather maps during their first years of operation. MTV was another early customer of the Paintbox.

In 1985, Quantel also released the "Harry" effects compositing system/non-linear editor. The Harry was designed to render special effects in non-real time to the video recorded on its built-in hard disk array (much like most computer based non-linear editing systems today). The hard disk array used drives made by Fujitsu, and were connected to the Harry using a proprietary parallel interface, much like a modern-day RAID array. Technically, it was the first all-digital non-linear editing system, since it could also do editing of the video that was recorded on the Harry. Due to 1980's digital storage technology not being as advanced as today, the Harry could only record 80 seconds of video, albeit encoded in full broadcast-quality, uncompressed D1-style 8-bit CCIR 601 format. This aside, the Harry was quite an advanced machine, and the only system like it for its time.

Since 2000, Quantel has expanded even further, specializing in:

the sQ, a video server systems for the broadcast industry which is designed for all forms of fast turnaround production, such as sports and news,
the Newsbox - a complete news production system in a box,
the iQ, a system used for digital intermediate film work
and the eQ, a system for post production and tv commercial work.

Tranditionaly Quantel systems were based around bespoke hardware & software. With the introduction of the generationQ range a number of Quantel products are now based on Microsoft Windows 2000 and standard PC hardware. Custom hardware is still used on the sQ servers and high end clients like the sQ Edit Plus and iQ systems.

Many of the major movies released since 1999 have been created or manipulated using Quantel technology, including and , , The Day After Tomorrow, and Sin City. Paintbox made today is complete new design to the earlier "Paintbox Classic" and is part of the integrated sQ offering. Picturebox sQ - a device that can play graphics sequences (clips) as well as the more traditional stillimages generated by the New Paintbox, joined the line-up in 2005.

Timeline

1975 DFS 3000 - Digital frame store.
1981 Paintbox
1982 Mirage - 3D real-time video effects processor
1986 Harry - Non-Linear Editor
1989 Paintbox V - Second generation paintbox, faster and smaller.
1990 Picturebox - Digital still store. Capacity is 520mb or 500 images. Increased to 1000 images with Picturebox twin.
1990 Harriet - Manipulating live graphics over video. Capacity is 323 PAL frames (around 12 seconds)
1992 Henry - Effects Editor which became the mainstay of the post industry across the world in the mid nineties.
1992 HAL - Video design suite.
1993 Dylan - RAID disk storage for video
1993 Editbox - Online NLE.
1994 Clipbox - Multiuser video servers.
1995 Open Picturenet - Networking for Quantel products.
2002 generationQ - Harnesses uncompressed storage through using Dylans, and runs on an 'open platform'allowing easier networking between machines, and file sharing. The new generation of products which includes the iQ, for digital intermediate. The eQ is for post and editing, and the gQ was aimed towards the graphics market.
2005 Paintbox - New Paintbox launched which is a powerful design and compositing tool. Dealing with the moving image, and still images, this new Paintbox is named in honour of the original Paintbox created in 1981.

External links

[Quantel's web site]

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