4 ms·

Quantel Paintbox History

35 points by dcminter 2y ago

AlanYx 2y ago
Quantel is a good example of how pivoting to patent litigation against competitors generally foreshadows a formerly innovative company's demise.
- sherr 2y ago
  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,
  - quantelpaintbox 2y ago
    There were literally dozens of companies selling digital paintbrush software in the 80's, for everything from your PC, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, PC or Mac, right through to more advanced or specialist computer systems used in gaming, 3D rendering, simulations, military etc.
- mrandish 2y ago
  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.
  - quantelpaintbox 2y ago
    Who were the "bunch of companies" you refer to?
- quantelpaintbox 2y ago
  Yeah there's so much nonsense perpetuated about Quantel being litigious. They only sued 2 companies in 30 years (compare that to Adobe's continuous malpractices!) and one was Spaceward who literally advertised their clone as a "cheaper Paintbox" and the other was Adobe for copying 5 or 6 elements of the Paintbox. Adobe couldn't show they didn't copy the Paintbox (they had a long history of copying software) so used Apple's lawyers to find previous use of the Paintbox features in US research labs. The 1997 case was heard in Delaware, where the Silicon Valley heavyweights pooled their resources to defeat the British company. The idea that Quantel were greedy and monopolistic is laughable considering how many paint systems were around and how few times Quantel ever sued over their patents - such as the pressure sensitive stylus. Even more laughable notion when Adobe had been fined by the FTC for destroying freehand, a competitor to Illustrator 3 years before the Quantel case. Quantel lost, Adobe became the monopolistic monolith with the paragraphs of malpractice criticisms on its wiki page, and of course the winner gets to write history as if they were the innocent victim fighting for the end user. Laughable really. Fact is, Quantel didn't ever want to be a retail multinational like Apple or software company like Adobe. Paintbox was launched before Adobe existed. Paintbox was used to create adverts for Photoshop showing things Photoshop couldn't do yet. In 1993, 8 years after Quantels Graphic Paintbox could! Yes it was more expensive but that's because it was bespoke, not a discount in a box. Obviously Quantel worked in a niche area with few high end users, so people are going to say they were elitist, evil or whatever. The facts don't match. Two lawsuits in 30 years. Lots if paint systems using a stylus angle tablet that emulated airbrush and paint in the 80's. Quantel didn't stop any of them. I should also point out that there is a fondness for Quantel as a company by former employees and end users that you don't have for Adobe. The inventor of the Paintbox spent his retirement helping rebuild Alan Turing's Bombe, not hanging out in Aspen or Monaco. Quantel did amazing things either first (live picture in picture, plus online linear video editing with the 1985 Harry) or the best - Paintbox, Mirage (live 3D), Graphic Paintbox (photoshop in 1985). They revolutionized broadcast TV, transforming it from analog to digital with some boffins in a small British town without the Silican Valley mega rich ecosystem. Anyone who dismisses them has no real clue.
lysace 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Sure, but you are comparing 1981 Quantel Paintbox with 1996 SGI Onyx2 - unless I misunderstood you.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        I suppose it's a matter of perspective.
        dylan604 2y ago
        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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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). That said, there was definitely a long period of time where a lot of computers capable of displaying one frame at a time of video output where used for animation by pairing them with an edit controller and an industrial or professional-grade editing video recorder. The computer would be hooked up via RS-232 (or 422) to the edit controller which would control the VTR to rewind to a certain point, roll forward and at the precisely correct moment record a single-frame insert edit onto the tape. Then the controller would stop tape and wait for the computer to signal it had loaded or rendered another frame for recording and repeat the process all over again. Not counting loading or rendering time, just recording each frame to tape probably took 10 or 15 seconds, so a decent length clip could take hours just to record. This sort of animation recording was common on Amigas (often with a Video Toaster installed), Macs and other computers with decent graphical output. Quantel's Harriet and other systems capable of real-time video playback in this era were the ultra luxury version that avoided trashing magnetic tape around to record animation and affordable only by the extreme high-end. Although even the "low-end" was far from cheap. As I recall, just the edit controller cost around $5,000 and VTRs capable of doing single-frame edits started at over $10,000 (all in 1980s dollars).
dylan604 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 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.
Wistar 2y ago
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.
- Lammy 2y ago
  Neat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjRcruWEedU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjRcruWEedU
  - Wistar 2y ago
    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.
- sherr 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
glxxyz 2y ago
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 https://youtu.be/ZI8RbdPe4ro
quantelpaintbox 2y ago
I have 4 working Paintboxes and was working on the last fully working DPB a couple of days ago in LA. My Instagram is @quantelpaintbox and am always collecting memories, software, hardware and peripherals for my archive and to post online. Adrian Wilson

35 points by dcminter 2y ago

Quantel is a good example of how pivoting to patent litigation against competitors generally foreshadows a formerly innovative company's demise.

sherr 2y ago
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,
- quantelpaintbox 2y ago
  There were literally dozens of companies selling digital paintbrush software in the 80's, for everything from your PC, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, PC or Mac, right through to more advanced or specialist computer systems used in gaming, 3D rendering, simulations, military etc.
mrandish 2y ago
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.
- quantelpaintbox 2y ago
  Who were the "bunch of companies" you refer to?
quantelpaintbox 2y ago
Yeah there's so much nonsense perpetuated about Quantel being litigious. They only sued 2 companies in 30 years (compare that to Adobe's continuous malpractices!) and one was Spaceward who literally advertised their clone as a "cheaper Paintbox" and the other was Adobe for copying 5 or 6 elements of the Paintbox. Adobe couldn't show they didn't copy the Paintbox (they had a long history of copying software) so used Apple's lawyers to find previous use of the Paintbox features in US research labs. The 1997 case was heard in Delaware, where the Silicon Valley heavyweights pooled their resources to defeat the British company. The idea that Quantel were greedy and monopolistic is laughable considering how many paint systems were around and how few times Quantel ever sued over their patents - such as the pressure sensitive stylus. Even more laughable notion when Adobe had been fined by the FTC for destroying freehand, a competitor to Illustrator 3 years before the Quantel case. Quantel lost, Adobe became the monopolistic monolith with the paragraphs of malpractice criticisms on its wiki page, and of course the winner gets to write history as if they were the innocent victim fighting for the end user. Laughable really. Fact is, Quantel didn't ever want to be a retail multinational like Apple or software company like Adobe. Paintbox was launched before Adobe existed. Paintbox was used to create adverts for Photoshop showing things Photoshop couldn't do yet. In 1993, 8 years after Quantels Graphic Paintbox could! Yes it was more expensive but that's because it was bespoke, not a discount in a box. Obviously Quantel worked in a niche area with few high end users, so people are going to say they were elitist, evil or whatever. The facts don't match. Two lawsuits in 30 years. Lots if paint systems using a stylus angle tablet that emulated airbrush and paint in the 80's. Quantel didn't stop any of them. I should also point out that there is a fondness for Quantel as a company by former employees and end users that you don't have for Adobe. The inventor of the Paintbox spent his retirement helping rebuild Alan Turing's Bombe, not hanging out in Aspen or Monaco. Quantel did amazing things either first (live picture in picture, plus online linear video editing with the 1985 Harry) or the best - Paintbox, Mirage (live 3D), Graphic Paintbox (photoshop in 1985). They revolutionized broadcast TV, transforming it from analog to digital with some boffins in a small British town without the Silican Valley mega rich ecosystem. Anyone who dismisses them has no real clue.

lysace 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Sure, but you are comparing 1981 Quantel Paintbox with 1996 SGI Onyx2 - unless I misunderstood you.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      I suppose it's a matter of perspective.
      - dylan604 2y ago
        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 2y ago

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 2y ago
> 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). That said, there was definitely a long period of time where a lot of computers capable of displaying one frame at a time of video output where used for animation by pairing them with an edit controller and an industrial or professional-grade editing video recorder. The computer would be hooked up via RS-232 (or 422) to the edit controller which would control the VTR to rewind to a certain point, roll forward and at the precisely correct moment record a single-frame insert edit onto the tape. Then the controller would stop tape and wait for the computer to signal it had loaded or rendered another frame for recording and repeat the process all over again. Not counting loading or rendering time, just recording each frame to tape probably took 10 or 15 seconds, so a decent length clip could take hours just to record. This sort of animation recording was common on Amigas (often with a Video Toaster installed), Macs and other computers with decent graphical output. Quantel's Harriet and other systems capable of real-time video playback in this era were the ultra luxury version that avoided trashing magnetic tape around to record animation and affordable only by the extreme high-end. Although even the "low-end" was far from cheap. As I recall, just the edit controller cost around $5,000 and VTRs capable of doing single-frame edits started at over $10,000 (all in 1980s dollars).

dylan604 2y ago

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 2y ago
> 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 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.

Wistar 2y ago

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.

Lammy 2y ago
Neat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjRcruWEedU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjRcruWEedU
- Wistar 2y ago
  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.
sherr 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.

glxxyz 2y ago

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 https://youtu.be/ZI8RbdPe4ro

quantelpaintbox 2y ago

I have 4 working Paintboxes and was working on the last fully working DPB a couple of days ago in LA. My Instagram is @quantelpaintbox and am always collecting memories, software, hardware and peripherals for my archive and to post online. Adrian Wilson