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> 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

> 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.

dylan604 2y ago
Fun fact story about the ADO and using it in 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 from the FCC 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 2y ago
  > 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!
  - dylan604 2y ago
    exactly, only for some reason they said a TBC would not make the correction. in a same but different fashion, passing a source with Macrovision through a TBC would just pass the Macrovision. Running the source with Macrovision through a standards converter without converting the standard would remove the Macrovision. when I was first starting, I would spend down time patching/routing the output of one thing into the input of another thing just to look at what the signal looked like before/after. that hacker ethos reveals itself in many forms
    - mrandish 2y ago
      > only for some reason they said a TBC would not make the correction Hmmm, maybe the TBC was just re-timing the sync but the ADO was fully stripping and regenerating everything outside the active picture area. A lot of early TBCs only had 8 or 16 lines of memory, whereas the ADO had to have had a full frame store. > I would spend down time patching/routing the output of one thing into the input of another Brings to mind a story. My first exposure to any real gear was at a tiny video studio that only had minimal older gear to make industrial quality stuff on 3/4" tape. Late one night when no one was around, I disconnected the main production switcher and re-wired it into a different configuration using our bottom-of-the-line Chyron VP-1 as a full frame graphics generator. The VP-1 was only a very basic lower-third generator. It was "cheap" because it had no interface at all, just an RS-232 port and the user had to supply a separate computer to send it text strings with simple formatting codes for font, color and spacing. Basically, like a Hayes modem for titling (ATDT "Co-Starring"). Being the "computer guy", I got the assignment of writing our titling software using a Kaypro CP/M machine to send codes. Since I'd written the software, it was easy to change it to generate strangely formatted stuff that still complied with the API. So that night I formatted a "lower-third" that started at the top of the screen and filled every line with maximum font-sized periods with zero kerning and zero line spacing. Because I chose a font where the period symbol was square, it filled the screen with a solid color. Modifying some of the lines to change certain period dots to have a foreground color of {transparent}, I was able to cut two side-by-side squares out of the center of the solid colored frame. Making the background color of the transparent period dots black, gave these inset squares soft-edged black drop shadows over the color field. Adding a one period-wide border to each square in an alternate foreground color was then a simple addition. I wired the switcher to make this a final layer with two cut-out windows to whatever was underneath. I then fired up two studio cameras and framed up distinct shots in each. Using the switcher's effect buss I set up a vertical wipe splitting the screen between the two cameras. The overlaid Chyron graphic covered the split line and I carefully framed each camera to compose a nice shot. Finally, I added a text title centered underneath each inset square. And recorded the final output before unhooking everything and re-wiring back to normal operation. The next day everyone was mystified when I showed them the recorded shot because I'd made something that looked exactly like a high-end network dual squeeze box digital effect with multiple busses of keyed graphics (in those days, shadows required a separate buss). All in a studio that had no ability to generate any graphics or any way to digitally reposition video. By rewiring components in odd ways and abusing various functionality it was possible to get some really interesting and unexpected results. Good times... :-)
quantelpaintbox 2y ago
Here's a video I took off order Quantel field engineer explaining how the DPB worked... https://youtu.be/p30TSpz49_s?si=0S2NgQybTmLsybqH https://youtu.be/p30TSpz49_s?si=0S2NgQybTmLsybqH

dylan604 2y ago

Fun fact story about the ADO and using it in 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 from the FCC 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 2y ago
> 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!
- dylan604 2y ago
  exactly, only for some reason they said a TBC would not make the correction. in a same but different fashion, passing a source with Macrovision through a TBC would just pass the Macrovision. Running the source with Macrovision through a standards converter without converting the standard would remove the Macrovision. when I was first starting, I would spend down time patching/routing the output of one thing into the input of another thing just to look at what the signal looked like before/after. that hacker ethos reveals itself in many forms
  - mrandish 2y ago
    > only for some reason they said a TBC would not make the correction Hmmm, maybe the TBC was just re-timing the sync but the ADO was fully stripping and regenerating everything outside the active picture area. A lot of early TBCs only had 8 or 16 lines of memory, whereas the ADO had to have had a full frame store. > I would spend down time patching/routing the output of one thing into the input of another Brings to mind a story. My first exposure to any real gear was at a tiny video studio that only had minimal older gear to make industrial quality stuff on 3/4" tape. Late one night when no one was around, I disconnected the main production switcher and re-wired it into a different configuration using our bottom-of-the-line Chyron VP-1 as a full frame graphics generator. The VP-1 was only a very basic lower-third generator. It was "cheap" because it had no interface at all, just an RS-232 port and the user had to supply a separate computer to send it text strings with simple formatting codes for font, color and spacing. Basically, like a Hayes modem for titling (ATDT "Co-Starring"). Being the "computer guy", I got the assignment of writing our titling software using a Kaypro CP/M machine to send codes. Since I'd written the software, it was easy to change it to generate strangely formatted stuff that still complied with the API. So that night I formatted a "lower-third" that started at the top of the screen and filled every line with maximum font-sized periods with zero kerning and zero line spacing. Because I chose a font where the period symbol was square, it filled the screen with a solid color. Modifying some of the lines to change certain period dots to have a foreground color of {transparent}, I was able to cut two side-by-side squares out of the center of the solid colored frame. Making the background color of the transparent period dots black, gave these inset squares soft-edged black drop shadows over the color field. Adding a one period-wide border to each square in an alternate foreground color was then a simple addition. I wired the switcher to make this a final layer with two cut-out windows to whatever was underneath. I then fired up two studio cameras and framed up distinct shots in each. Using the switcher's effect buss I set up a vertical wipe splitting the screen between the two cameras. The overlaid Chyron graphic covered the split line and I carefully framed each camera to compose a nice shot. Finally, I added a text title centered underneath each inset square. And recorded the final output before unhooking everything and re-wiring back to normal operation. The next day everyone was mystified when I showed them the recorded shot because I'd made something that looked exactly like a high-end network dual squeeze box digital effect with multiple busses of keyed graphics (in those days, shadows required a separate buss). All in a studio that had no ability to generate any graphics or any way to digitally reposition video. By rewiring components in odd ways and abusing various functionality it was possible to get some really interesting and unexpected results. Good times... :-)

quantelpaintbox 2y ago

Here's a video I took off order Quantel field engineer explaining how the DPB worked... https://youtu.be/p30TSpz49_s?si=0S2NgQybTmLsybqH https://youtu.be/p30TSpz49_s?si=0S2NgQybTmLsybqH