Quantel
Encyclopedia
Quantel is a company 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 which is making reference to the process of converting a television
picture into a digital
signal.
In the 1980s, Peter Michael merged Quantel (along with his other interests) into the UEI Group of companies. Peter became Chairman with Quantel remaining a privately owned company of the publicly quoted UEI.
Quantel has made several pioneering firsts in video:
MTV
was another early customer of the Paintbox. When the BBC
weather department decided to move from magnetic weather symbols on a board in 1985 to a complete digital solution they used modified Paintboxes which were controlled via Apple Macintosh computers. The weather presenter then stood in front of a blue screen holding a button that was connected to the Macintosh; which then in turn communicated with the Paintbox to bring up the next slide.
who had also acquired high end sound console manufacturer Solid State Logic
as part of the same deal. This relationship ended in 2000 when Quantel management bought the company back for $76.6m.
Since 2000, Quantel has specialized in:
December 2005 saw the departure from the board of long-standing Chairman and Chief Executive Richard Taylor to be replaced by Ray Cross as CEO. Prior to this Ray worked with Richard to create the business plan to present to Lloyds Bank
venture capital arm LDC for the 2000 management buyout from Carlton Communications. Richard was diagnosed with cancer in December 2008 and died in June 2009.
In 2006 Research & Development Director Paul Kellar was replaced on the board by another long-standing Quantel employee Neil Hinson. Neil had joined Quantel in 1980 and played a key part in the design of many classic Quantel products including Harry, Henry, Mirage and Clipbox as well as the later generationQ family of products before resigning in January 2008, to be replaced later in the year by another long-standing Quantel employee Simon Rogers.
In the autumn of 2008 Quantel engaged in restructuring, including a sizeable round of redundancies. The reason given was that the company was moving towards being more software based. Another round of redundancies took place in April 2009. The reason given for this was that the global recession has been deeper than they had planned for.
and manufactured Spitfire
fighter aircraft during World War II
. Air raid shelters are still present in the grounds of the site. Other users of the building included the Post Office and the Ministry of Transport.
A large part of the current site is dedicated to manufacturing. It is now very rare that companies manufacturer their own products due to the complex nature of multiple layer circuit boards containing high density surface mounted
components. It is more common now to design complex circuits on a computer and await delivery of a ready built board.
New circuit boards in turn contain large Field Programmable Gate Array chips which can be programmed when a device starts up. This can create a single circuit board which previously would have been made up of a larger amount of chips across more boards all requiring manufacturing and testing with increased cost.
On the 1st October 2008 Quantel ended the outsourcing contract with Effect Systems. Effect will continue to offer independent support for Quantel legacy equipment.
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.
Quantel has always been very protective of their product designs and patents especially relating to Paintbox type functionality. This triggered a number of legal battles over the years, most notably against Spaceward Graphics and their Matisse system (won in 1990) and Adobe Systems
and their Photoshop application (lost in 1997).
The majority of Quantel products use code names for some parts of their systems. One source of code names was the television series The Magic Roundabout
. The Dylan disk system and the Zebedee processor take their names from characters in this series.
Many of the major movies released since 1999 have been created or manipulated using Quantel technology, including Star Wars episode 2
and 3
, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Day After Tomorrow
, and Sin City
. Paintbox made today is a 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.
Quantel hardware is used in some form by most broadcasters around the world. Users of sQ server based systems include ESPN
in the USA, and BBC
, BSkyB and QVC
in the United Kingdom.
Quantel copied an idea from mobile phone companies and introduced 'Pay as you Go HD'. This allowed customers to purchase high definition capable equipment but use it for standard definition and only pay for high definition when required.
FrameMagic - A system used on video servers where video clips are treated as individual frames rather than a single clip. This allows very efficient use of storage as only frames used in subsequent edits need to be kept from an original recording. This allows the rest of the unused frames to be discarded.
TimeMagic - A background rendering system which renders editing effects as the operator continues working.
Resolution Co-existence - Allows a video edit to be made up of different formats of source material without any extra work required by the operator. One example is an edit that will play out standard definition but some parts of the edit may be part of a high definition source clip.
Genetic Engineering - An open technology that allows multiple users to work on the same media independently without having to have multiple copies of it.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
and founded in 1973 that designs and manufactures digital
Digital
A digital system is a data technology that uses discrete values. By contrast, non-digital systems use a continuous range of values to represent information...
production equipment for the broadcast
Broadcasting
Broadcasting is the distribution of audio and video content to a dispersed audience via any audio visual medium. Receiving parties may include the general public or a relatively large subset of thereof...
television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
, video production
Video production
Video production is videography, the process of capturing moving images on electronic media even streaming media. The term includes methods of production and post-production...
and motion picture industries. They are headquartered in Newbury, Berkshire
Newbury, Berkshire
Newbury is a civil parish and the principal town in the west of the county of Berkshire in England. It is situated on the River Kennet and the Kennet and Avon Canal, and has a town centre containing many 17th century buildings. Newbury is best known for its racecourse and the adjoining former USAF...
.
The name Quantel comes from Quantised Television which is making reference to the process of converting a television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
picture into a digital
Digital
A digital system is a data technology that uses discrete values. By contrast, non-digital systems use a continuous range of values to represent information...
signal.
History
Quantel founder, Peter Michael, had previously founded Micro Consultants Group (MCG). MCG had pioneered a range of fast data conversion products that could be used for converting video signals from analog to digital and back to analog. These devices found use in many early Quantel products.In the 1980s, Peter Michael merged Quantel (along with his other interests) into the UEI Group of companies. Peter became Chairman with Quantel remaining a privately owned company of the publicly quoted UEI.
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 Olympics1976 Summer OlympicsThe 1976 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXI Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event celebrated in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1976. Montreal was awarded the rights to the 1976 Games on May 12, 1970, at the 69th IOC Session in Amsterdam, over the bids of Moscow and...
to generate a picture-in-picturePicture-in-picturePicture in Picture is a feature of some television receivers and similar devices. One program is displayed on the full TV screen at the same time as one or more other programs are displayed in inset windows. Sound is usually from the main program only.Picture in Picture requires two independent...
inset of the Olympics' flaming torch while the rest of the picture featured the runner entering the stadium. Framestore technology provided the cornerstone for the future development of digital television products.
- In 1981, they released the PaintboxQuantel PaintboxThe Quantel Paintbox was a dedicated computer graphics workstation for composition of broadcast television video and graphics. Its design emphasizes the studio workflow efficiency required for live news production...
, 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 number '1' in the USA), which was used to generate their on-air weather maps during their first years of operation.
MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
was another early customer of the Paintbox. When the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
weather department decided to move from magnetic weather symbols on a board in 1985 to a complete digital solution they used modified Paintboxes which were controlled via Apple Macintosh computers. The weather presenter then stood in front of a blue screen holding a button that was connected to the Macintosh; which then in turn communicated with the Paintbox to bring up the next slide.
- In 1985, Quantel 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 FujitsuFujitsuis a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues....
, 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 technical constraints of the time, the Harry could only record 80 seconds of video, albeit encoded in full broadcast-quality, uncompressed D1D1 (Sony)D-1 is an SMPTE digital recording video standard, introduced in 1986 through efforts by SMPTE engineering committees. It started as a Sony and Bosch - BTS product and was the first major professional digital video format.- Format :...
-style 8-bit CCIR 601CCIR 601ITU-R Recommendation BT.601, more commonly known by the abbreviations Rec. 601 or BT.601 is a standard published in 1982 by International Telecommunication Union - Radiocommunications sector for encoding interlaced analog video signals in digital video form...
format. This aside, the Harry was quite an advanced machine, and the only system like it for its time.
Recent history
In 1989 Quantel was acquired from UEI by Carlton CommunicationsCarlton Communications
Carlton Communications was a British media company. It was led by Michael Green and listed on the London Stock Exchange from 1983 until 2 February 2004, when it taken over by Granada plc to form ITV plc with Carlton gaining 32% of the new company....
who had also acquired high end sound console manufacturer Solid State Logic
Solid State Logic
Solid State Logic is a manufacturer of high-end mixing consoles and recording studio hardware headquartered in Begbroke, Oxfordshire, UK.- Company information :...
as part of the same deal. This relationship ended in 2000 when Quantel management bought the company back for $76.6m.
Since 2000, Quantel has specialized in:
- sQ - Video serverVideo serverA video server is a computer based device dedicated to delivering video.Unlike personal computers, being multi-application devices, a video server is designed for one purpose; provisioning video, often for broadcasters. A professional grade video server records, stores, and playout of multiple...
based system for the broadcast industry which is designed for all forms of fast turnaround production, such as sports and news - Newsbox - Complete news production system in a box
- iQ - Used for digital intermediateDigital intermediateDigital intermediate is a motion picture finishing process which classically involves digitizing a motion picture and manipulating the color and other image characteristics. It often replaces or augments the photochemical timing process and is usually the final creative adjustment to a movie...
film work - eQ - Used for post production and TV commercial work
- Pablo - Color grading system
- Mission - A Media and Asset management system for handling media in large systems
December 2005 saw the departure from the board of long-standing Chairman and Chief Executive Richard Taylor to be replaced by Ray Cross as CEO. Prior to this Ray worked with Richard to create the business plan to present to Lloyds Bank
Lloyds Bank
Lloyds Bank Plc was a British retail bank which operated in England and Wales from 1765 until its merger into Lloyds TSB in 1995; it remains a registered company but is currently dormant. It expanded during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and took over a number of smaller banking companies...
venture capital arm LDC for the 2000 management buyout from Carlton Communications. Richard was diagnosed with cancer in December 2008 and died in June 2009.
In 2006 Research & Development Director Paul Kellar was replaced on the board by another long-standing Quantel employee Neil Hinson. Neil had joined Quantel in 1980 and played a key part in the design of many classic Quantel products including Harry, Henry, Mirage and Clipbox as well as the later generationQ family of products before resigning in January 2008, to be replaced later in the year by another long-standing Quantel employee Simon Rogers.
In the autumn of 2008 Quantel engaged in restructuring, including a sizeable round of redundancies. The reason given was that the company was moving towards being more software based. Another round of redundancies took place in April 2009. The reason given for this was that the global recession has been deeper than they had planned for.
Timeline
- 1973 TBC 2000 / TBC 2200 - Time base corrector.
- 1975 DFS 3000 - Digital framestore synchroniser.
- 1977 DSC 4002 - Digital video standards converterVideo standards converterVideo standards converter is a video device that converts NTSC to PAL and/or PAL to NTSC.The PAL TV signals may be transcoded to or from SECAM.Video standards converter is used so TV shows can be viewed in nations with different video standards....
. - 1978 DPE 5000 - Digital processing effects. One of the first digital video effects systems.
- 1981 PaintboxQuantel PaintboxThe Quantel Paintbox was a dedicated computer graphics workstation for composition of broadcast television video and graphics. Its design emphasizes the studio workflow efficiency required for live news production...
. - 1982 MirageQuantel MirageThe Quantel Mirage, or DVM8000/1 "Digital Video Manipulator", was a digital real-time video effects processor introduced by Quantel in 1982. It was capable of warping a live video stream by texture mapping it onto an arbitrary three-dimensional shape, around which the viewer could freely rotate or...
- 3D real-time video effects processor. - 1986 Harry - Non-Linear EditorNLENLE is an acronym. It may stand for:* Non-linear editing system* National Latin Examination* North Luzon Expressway* N.L.E. Tractors, a codename for Cultivator No. 6...
. - 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 PALPALPAL, short for Phase Alternating Line, is an analogue television colour encoding system used in broadcast television systems in many countries. Other common analogue television systems are NTSC and SECAM. This page primarily discusses the PAL colour encoding system...
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 and audio.
- 1993 Editbox - Online NLENLENLE is an acronym. It may stand for:* Non-linear editing system* National Latin Examination* North Luzon Expressway* N.L.E. Tractors, a codename for Cultivator No. 6...
. - 1993 Domino - A film in, film out editing system.
- 1994 Clipbox - Multi-user video server.
- 1995 Open Picturenet - Networking for Quantel products.
- 1998 Inspiration - Integrated news and sports production system.
- 2000 iQ - Media editing and compositing platform. Unique hardware and software architecture allows scalability and access for third-party developers.
- 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.
- 2005 Newsbox - A complete television newsroom production system to record, edit and playout news material.
- 2005 Pablo - Color grading system.
- 2005 Picturebox sQ - Graphics server for stills and moving sequences.
- 2006 Pablo HD - High definition color grading system.
- 2006 Newsbox HD - High definition capable version of Newsbox.
- 2006 Marco - Software only DV field editor.
- 2007 Mission - Media and asset management system.
- 2007 Stereoscopic 3D - 3D post-production system.
- 2008 Pablo Neo - Ergonomic ‘heads up’ control panel for Pablo post-production system.
- 2010 QTube - Global media workflow technology, enabling viewing and editing of media from anywhere using the internet.
- 2011 Qube - Generation broadcast craft editor that uses CUDA GPU processing.
Headquarters and manufacturing
Quantel has been based at 31 Turnpike Road, Newbury, Berkshire, England since 1982. The 126000 sq ft (11,705.8 m²) building was built on the 6.7 acres (27,114 m²) site in 1940 for Vickers ArmstrongVickers Armstrong
Vickers-Armstrongs Limited was a British engineering conglomerate formed by the merger of the assets of Vickers Limited and Sir W G Armstrong Whitworth & Company in 1927...
and manufactured Spitfire
Supermarine Spitfire
The Supermarine Spitfire is a British single-seat fighter aircraft that was used by the Royal Air Force and many other Allied countries throughout the Second World War. The Spitfire continued to be used as a front line fighter and in secondary roles into the 1950s...
fighter aircraft during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. Air raid shelters are still present in the grounds of the site. Other users of the building included the Post Office and the Ministry of Transport.
A large part of the current site is dedicated to manufacturing. It is now very rare that companies manufacturer their own products due to the complex nature of multiple layer circuit boards containing high density surface mounted
Surface-mount technology
Surface mount technology is a method for constructing electronic circuits in which the components are mounted directly onto the surface of printed circuit boards . An electronic device so made is called a surface mount device...
components. It is more common now to design complex circuits on a computer and await delivery of a ready built board.
New circuit boards in turn contain large Field Programmable Gate Array chips which can be programmed when a device starts up. This can create a single circuit board which previously would have been made up of a larger amount of chips across more boards all requiring manufacturing and testing with increased cost.
Effect Systems Limited
As part of ongoing restructuring during the 1990s, Quantel decided to outsource support of legacy products to a separate company Effect Systems. Also based in Newbury and staffed by many ex Quantel staff, Effect Systems took over support for products. These include Editbox, Henry, Hal, Paintbox, Picturebox, Domino as well as older products dating back to the 1980s including Mirage, Harry and Encore.On the 1st October 2008 Quantel ended the outsourcing contract with Effect Systems. Effect will continue to offer independent support for Quantel legacy equipment.
Product technology and usage
Traditionally, Quantel systems were based around proprietary hardware & software. With the introduction of the generationQ range a number of Quantel products are now based on Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
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.
Quantel has always been very protective of their product designs and patents especially relating to Paintbox type functionality. This triggered a number of legal battles over the years, most notably against Spaceward Graphics and their Matisse system (won in 1990) and Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
and their Photoshop application (lost in 1997).
The majority of Quantel products use code names for some parts of their systems. One source of code names was the television series The Magic Roundabout
The Magic Roundabout
The Magic Roundabout was a children's television programme created in France in 1963 by Serge Danot...
. The Dylan disk system and the Zebedee processor take their names from characters in this series.
Many of the major movies released since 1999 have been created or manipulated using Quantel technology, including Star Wars episode 2
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones is a 2002 American epic space opera film directed by George Lucas and written by Lucas and Jonathan Hales. It is the fifth film to be released in the Star Wars saga and the second in terms of the series' internal chronology...
and 3
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is a 2005 American epic space opera film written and directed by George Lucas. It is the sixth and final film released in the Star Wars saga and the third in terms of the series' internal chronology....
, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Day After Tomorrow
The Day After Tomorrow
The Day After Tomorrow is a 2004 American science-fiction disaster film that depicts the catastrophic effects of global warming in a series of extreme weather events that usher in global cooling which leads to a new ice age. The film did well at the box office, grossing $542,771,772 internationally...
, and Sin City
Sin City (film)
Sin City, also known as Frank Miller's Sin City, is a 2005 crime thriller film written, produced and directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez...
. Paintbox made today is a complete new design to the earlier "Paintbox Classic
Quantel Paintbox
The Quantel Paintbox was a dedicated computer graphics workstation for composition of broadcast television video and graphics. Its design emphasizes the studio workflow efficiency required for live news production...
" 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.
Quantel hardware is used in some form by most broadcasters around the world. Users of sQ server based systems include ESPN
ESPN
Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, commonly known as ESPN, is an American global cable television network focusing on sports-related programming including live and pre-taped event telecasts, sports talk shows, and other original programming....
in the USA, and BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
, BSkyB and QVC
QVC
QVC is a multinational corporation specializing in televised home shopping. Founded in 1986 by Joseph Segel in West Goshen Township, Pennsylvania, United States, QVC broadcasts in five countries as QVC US, QVC UK, QVC Germany, QVC Japan and – QVC Italy to 200 million households...
in the United Kingdom.
Quantel copied an idea from mobile phone companies and introduced 'Pay as you Go HD'. This allowed customers to purchase high definition capable equipment but use it for standard definition and only pay for high definition when required.
Quantel-designed technologies
Dynamic Rounding - Dynamic Rounding is a technique devised by Quantel for truncating the word length of pixels – a process you can't avoid when you are processing images. Rather than simply losing the lower bits, Dynamic Rounding uses their information to control, via a randomiser, the dither of the LSB of the truncated result. This effectively removes any artefacts that would otherwise be visible. Dynamic rounding is non-cumulative on any number of passes and produces statistically correct results. Dynamic rounding eliminates any truncation artefacts.FrameMagic - A system used on video servers where video clips are treated as individual frames rather than a single clip. This allows very efficient use of storage as only frames used in subsequent edits need to be kept from an original recording. This allows the rest of the unused frames to be discarded.
TimeMagic - A background rendering system which renders editing effects as the operator continues working.
Resolution Co-existence - Allows a video edit to be made up of different formats of source material without any extra work required by the operator. One example is an edit that will play out standard definition but some parts of the edit may be part of a high definition source clip.
Genetic Engineering - An open technology that allows multiple users to work on the same media independently without having to have multiple copies of it.