Quantel Paintbox History
19 comments
·January 27, 2025Wistar
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
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
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.
dylan604
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
> 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
Fun fact story about the ADO and using it 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 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
> 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!
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KaiserPro
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.
lysace
> 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
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.
AlanYx
Quantel is a good example of how pivoting to patent litigation against competitors generally foreshadows a formerly innovative company's demise.
sherr
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,
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