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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 t

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).
quantelpaintbox 2y ago
The 1981 paintbox had a 300mb drive where hundreds of stills could be stored in an internal library. Other systems had libraries too, plus the "old and new" working frame store on the menu. No, there was famously no "undo" button on Paintbox but as they used to say, "Michaelangelo had no undo button when carving David". If you used a paintbox etc it was expected you were a good artist and at $500 an hour I was paid in the 80's, mistakes were too expensive and so we learned to get it right first time!

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).

quantelpaintbox 2y ago

The 1981 paintbox had a 300mb drive where hundreds of stills could be stored in an internal library. Other systems had libraries too, plus the "old and new" working frame store on the menu. No, there was famously no "undo" button on Paintbox but as they used to say, "Michaelangelo had no undo button when carving David". If you used a paintbox etc it was expected you were a good artist and at $500 an hour I was paid in the 80's, mistakes were too expensive and so we learned to get it right first time!