Taking a whistle stop tour around my newly fixed Quantel V-Series Paintbox. By recording it's CCIR656 digital video output this video shows the very best footage of the Paintbox yet seen on youtube. / dexterslab2013 dexterslab2013....
Wow. So weird to see this in action again. I worked on a Paintbox from 1988 to 1997 at a major cable television network and at a local nbc news affiliate. Now it's an antique compared to today's computers and Abobe software. The one thing I loved about it was that it was blazingly fast for creating graphics for TV. Once you master the menu operations a talented artist could create amazing graphics in record time. Even compared with today's computers with Photoshop, the Quantel is still faster, mainly because the menu operation was so intuitive to how an artist really works with real paints and brush. Photoshop's interface was designed by a programmer and it feels like it. There's nothing intuitive about it.
I have extremely fond memories of using the Paintbox, starting back in the early 1990's. Once I was up to speed and familiar using the interface and in using a Wacom tablet, it was insanely fast and fun to use. Yes we didn't have an UNDO, but that really taught you to focus, plan and be accurate. Thank you for the video as it brings back lots of memories. The interface's core spirit was carried on in the Flash Harry, Editbox, Henry IQ, EQ and Neo. I had worked with all of them, had become a Certified Quantel Trainer and eventually moved onto Discreet Logic's Flame/Inferno/Smoke (another great system). This was a truly exciting and fruitful era to work in. Thanks for the reminder.
Thanks for this! The Quantel Paintbox was the first "paint" tool I learned about and was oneof the main reasons I started to learn to program and got into software engineering.
Great to see this! I was a Paintbox artist in NYC for about 20 years. Worked everywhere. Really, really loved the speed and accuracy of this device. Bought me a home and a few cars! LOL
It's a shame i'm no artist or i'd try and do something interesting with it. Did you work with the original hardware like the DPB-7000 or with the later hardware like the v-series?
I worked on both. The V series really opened up the possibilities. I was a Hal / Harry artist too. Loved that career. Very fast on it. Where are you located?
Quantel was based out of the UK but I guess it's systems were used worldwide it seems. I think I first learned of the Paintbox back in the 80's watching a documentary on Computer Animation/Graphics.
big thumbs up. the whole story is so exciting. Vintage equipment brought back to life. And yes, all the paintbox footage out there is OOOLD, in bad quality. You are doing a great job! I guess the old Quantel engineers would be happy to see this.
This is great! I am a techie in a theatre and had been directed to a you tube video of a BBC 1 O'Clock news recording from 1986. In this you can hear the control room which is in total chaos! You can hear the director saying "animate Quantel" which made me wonder what it was and now I know! Thankyou so much I really enjoyed watching this video. Amazing how far we have come. Reminds me of my old Acorn Electron. Brilliant! Thanks.
Thanks Nick! If it was 1986 it could also have been a Quantel Mirage, which was often used for live broadcast as it could generate real-time 3D graphics animation with live video. Do you have a link to the video?
Hi. I can't get the link to work but the video is called ' one o'clock news Christmas 1986' posted by 'newsbunny' do any Quantel mirage machines still exist?
Thanks, i found it. Sounds like the gallery was in chaos LOL! After seeing the effects though i think it might be the Quantel DPE-5001 rather than the Mirage (DVM-8000) which did 3D shapes, like wrapping video around a sphere for example. I would be surprised if any Mirage systems exist today. There is a Mirage showreel on my other channel if you want to see the effects it made: th-cam.com/video/RkzhnTWsWQo/w-d-xo.html
I operated Quantel Harriet Paintbox V-series in 1992-2006 at an in-house postproduction studio in Cebu, City Philippines. The whole set up was bought in Hongkong Quantel sales office by International Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
I used the Quantel Graphic Paintbox from 1988 (in fact late 1987) and until around 1998, very demanding but also very exciting equipment :-) The one in the video is the littlebrother to the Graphic Paintbox :-)
@@DextersTechLab The strange story was that wee started with the Graphic Paintbox in Denmark in 1987, an around 1999 wee stopped using the equipment because it was outdated. I offered the equipment to a museeum of print and typing, and they refuseed even they could get it for free. The Quantel Graphic Paintbox was about 1.000.000 US dollars :-)
Great to see this. The beginning of everything VFX the come. What about the buy and sell peddles? Paintbox w Harry and encore for video vfx, what great system it was. It cost a million bucks back then for everything and outboard gear but we charged 3500 an hour. We were booked solid for a decade and made boat loads of cash. Harry turned into a Henry then came the Flame systems which are still the commercial standard of today, 25 years later. I remember I had different paintbox pens, one would even drip paint like a real spray can. Everything today is just so much better in most every way and yet I would love to get my hands on this to play with again. Enjoy.
16:12 That should have been “cel”, not “cell”. The term comes from the use of celluloid overlays for drawing characters in traditional hand-drawn animation.
If anything, the Paintbox's use of a palette to add multiple colors to and then pick the blended color to use in your picture didn't carry over to Photoshop or other apps these days. That was a neat idea for it's time in preserving what adding colors on a paint palette was.
What a great Demo you done....many many thanx !!! :) In my Amiga A2000 i had a Genlock and a software which looked almost as a copy of this layout, now i know where it´s comming from;) also DPaint was very inspired by the quantel look and feel :-D Thanx for this demo...!! Keep them comming :) :) Apple copied the Xerox Alto and Adobe copied the Paintbox... But still image processing is just touching the surface...the magic happens within a running video and let the painbox playback recorded live manipulation and stencil another running video in, may with added 3D FX on the fly...
The Amiga certainly was a more affordable way for someone to get into digital art at a time when machines like the Quantel Paintbox was around. I think Newtek's DigiPaint similated the Paintbox layout. th-cam.com/video/bJwenGW8eoU/w-d-xo.html Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint was also a perfect killer app for the system
Absolutely amazing. Do you have a showcase of the textures used in Paintbox? I've been looking for them online but can't seem to find them. I'd love to see all the various textures that were included. Thanks!
Sorry for the slow reply! Although there was a handful of example/sample images included with the software from Quantel they didn't come with anything included really. Everything you saw on screen was created from scratch by the artist usually. Are you looking for something specific?
On the standard v-series it was the opacity of the brush and 'flow' of the airbrush, other functions like pasteup (cut and paste) the pressure increased the sensitivity of moving objects on screen. In the later Express models you could use the pressure and pen direction to control many other parameters like brush size, colour, opacity and brush direction (for use with custom brushes)
So much nostalgia. I learned Paintbox at college in the late Eighties and worked with Henry editors in the early nineties. A couple of years ago I downloaded the Compass software from the Quantel website before it disappeared, but never got it working. Is there any way to emulate the system in software on a modern PC?
Always great to hear from an ex-quantel user. Sadly there is no emulator, though i am working with someone else to hopefully emulate the DPB-7000 'Classic' Paintbox. The only way to see or use a Paintbox now is to have the real thing and there's only a handful of systems left running.
@@DextersTechLab thanks for the respond I understand that you're too busy person but please make a short video with the fonts of Quantel Paintbox Henry when you have time.I will probaly never have a chance to see that software in this life,please help me.I will be grateful to you rest of my life.
Sad, but then, that's how progress happens. What used to be an industry standard nobody could afford on a consumer level finally became affordable (and portable) in the long run. But yeah, hardware version of what Photoshop is was what we had back then when mammoths like this were around.
if you need a BNC to Mini-DIN cable for the Blackmagic device, let me know. I am selling them on ebay in taylor made sizes, but I am willing to send you one for free.
Wow. So weird to see this in action again. I worked on a Paintbox from 1988 to 1997 at a major cable television network and at a local nbc news affiliate. Now it's an antique compared to today's computers and Abobe software. The one thing I loved about it was that it was blazingly fast for creating graphics for TV. Once you master the menu operations a talented artist could create amazing graphics in record time. Even compared with today's computers with Photoshop, the Quantel is still faster, mainly because the menu operation was so intuitive to how an artist really works with real paints and brush. Photoshop's interface was designed by a programmer and it feels like it. There's nothing intuitive about it.
Thanks, it's always great to hear from quantel artists!
I have extremely fond memories of using the Paintbox, starting back in the early 1990's. Once I was up to speed and familiar using the interface and in using a Wacom tablet, it was insanely fast and fun to use. Yes we didn't have an UNDO, but that really taught you to focus, plan and be accurate. Thank you for the video as it brings back lots of memories. The interface's core spirit was carried on in the Flash Harry, Editbox, Henry IQ, EQ and Neo. I had worked with all of them, had become a Certified Quantel Trainer and eventually moved onto Discreet Logic's Flame/Inferno/Smoke (another great system). This was a truly exciting and fruitful era to work in. Thanks for the reminder.
Thanks Theo, i always like hearing from anyone who used Quantel's stuff.
Thanks for this! The Quantel Paintbox was the first "paint" tool I learned about and was oneof the main reasons I started to learn to program and got into software engineering.
I think the paintbox inspired many people! Did you get to use a paintbox?
Great to see this! I was a Paintbox artist in NYC for about 20 years. Worked everywhere. Really, really loved the speed and accuracy of this device. Bought me a home and a few cars! LOL
It's a shame i'm no artist or i'd try and do something interesting with it. Did you work with the original hardware like the DPB-7000 or with the later hardware like the v-series?
I worked on both. The V series really opened up the possibilities. I was a Hal / Harry artist too. Loved that career. Very fast on it. Where are you located?
I'm in Manchester, UK.
Oops! A bit far. I'm in NY
Quantel was based out of the UK but I guess it's systems were used worldwide it seems. I think I first learned of the Paintbox back in the 80's watching a documentary on Computer Animation/Graphics.
big thumbs up.
the whole story is so exciting. Vintage equipment brought back to life. And yes, all the paintbox footage out there is OOOLD, in bad quality. You are doing a great job! I guess the old Quantel engineers would be happy to see this.
Thanks Max! :-)
At least we have something.
This is great! I am a techie in a theatre and had been directed to a you tube video of a BBC 1 O'Clock news recording from 1986. In this you can hear the control room which is in total chaos! You can hear the director saying "animate Quantel" which made me wonder what it was and now I know! Thankyou so much I really enjoyed watching this video. Amazing how far we have come. Reminds me of my old Acorn Electron. Brilliant! Thanks.
Thanks Nick! If it was 1986 it could also have been a Quantel Mirage, which was often used for live broadcast as it could generate real-time 3D graphics animation with live video. Do you have a link to the video?
Hi. I can't get the link to work but the video is called ' one o'clock news Christmas 1986' posted by 'newsbunny' do any Quantel mirage machines still exist?
Thanks, i found it. Sounds like the gallery was in chaos LOL! After seeing the effects though i think it might be the Quantel DPE-5001 rather than the Mirage (DVM-8000) which did 3D shapes, like wrapping video around a sphere for example. I would be surprised if any Mirage systems exist today. There is a Mirage showreel on my other channel if you want to see the effects it made: th-cam.com/video/RkzhnTWsWQo/w-d-xo.html
Such a reassuring whirring background noise. I miss that.
I operated Quantel Harriet Paintbox V-series in 1992-2006 at an in-house postproduction studio in Cebu, City Philippines. The whole set up was bought in Hongkong Quantel sales office by International Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Very interesting! Looking forward to the next videos! Thanks!
I used the Quantel Graphic Paintbox from 1988 (in fact late 1987) and until around 1998, very demanding but also very exciting equipment :-)
The one in the video is the littlebrother to the Graphic Paintbox :-)
Thanks for the comment, i would love to find a graphic paintbox, but it's nice to do video animation on mine
@@DextersTechLab The strange story was that wee started with the Graphic Paintbox in Denmark in 1987, an around 1999 wee stopped using the equipment because it was outdated. I offered the equipment to a museeum of print and typing, and they refuseed even they could get it for free. The Quantel Graphic Paintbox was about 1.000.000 US dollars :-)
@@leifnrmark5887 Amazing the museum didn't want it, they probably didn't realise it's significance.
I love how times have moved on. From so much hardware to do what you did can now be done on a mobile phone. Great Vid :)
Thank you, yes CPUs got fast enough they could so much more so that it didn't need to be done with custom hardware.
Damn ... I can't even begin to think about how I'm gonna imagine how hard it must've been to hardwire all that stuff - superb results though !
Great to see this. The beginning of everything VFX the come. What about the buy and sell peddles? Paintbox w Harry and encore for video vfx, what great system it was. It cost a million bucks back then for everything and outboard gear but we charged 3500 an hour. We were booked solid for a decade and made boat loads of cash. Harry turned into a Henry then came the Flame systems which are still the commercial standard of today, 25 years later. I remember I had different paintbox pens, one would even drip paint like a real spray can. Everything today is just so much better in most every way and yet I would love to get my hands on this to play with again. Enjoy.
We used one of those to make the credits of Hollyoaks. I believe they also did the filmic effect on the paintbox.
+glenwoofit cool, they were used everywhere!
cold start brrrr haha
a little engineering humour, on a reboot it says 'warm start phew!'
Now you just need a Harry to go with it!
dang... modern software doesn't have this kind of charm. wish i could try paintbox.
Anyone old enough to remember Logica' s "Flair"?
always wondered where those fx came from
16:12 That should have been “cel”, not “cell”. The term comes from the use of celluloid overlays for drawing characters in traditional hand-drawn animation.
Coming here from "money for nothing" song n' #video of course... ✨👏
If anything, the Paintbox's use of a palette to add multiple colors to and then pick the blended color to use in your picture didn't carry over to Photoshop or other apps these days. That was a neat idea for it's time in preserving what adding colors on a paint palette was.
I agree, that is probably the feature I miss the most. Photoshop doesn't allow you to do this easily and the palette just isn't as fluid as Paintbox.
Beau Tardy I see you agree with me there!
What a great Demo you done....many many thanx !!! :)
In my Amiga A2000 i had a Genlock and a software which looked almost as a copy of this layout, now i know where it´s comming from;) also DPaint was very inspired by the quantel look and feel :-D
Thanx for this demo...!! Keep them comming :) :)
Apple copied the Xerox Alto and Adobe copied the Paintbox...
But still image processing is just touching the surface...the magic happens within a running video and let the painbox playback recorded live manipulation and stencil another running video in, may with added 3D FX on the fly...
Thanks! I must admit, it would be nice to see the live video input and keying
The Amiga certainly was a more affordable way for someone to get into digital art at a time when machines like the Quantel Paintbox was around. I think Newtek's DigiPaint similated the Paintbox layout.
th-cam.com/video/bJwenGW8eoU/w-d-xo.html
Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint was also a perfect killer app for the system
Absolutely amazing. Do you have a showcase of the textures used in Paintbox? I've been looking for them online but can't seem to find them. I'd love to see all the various textures that were included. Thanks!
Sorry for the slow reply! Although there was a handful of example/sample images included with the software from Quantel they didn't come with anything included really. Everything you saw on screen was created from scratch by the artist usually. Are you looking for something specific?
Which aspects of the drawing can be affected by pressure sensitivity? Opacity? Brush size? Colour?
On the standard v-series it was the opacity of the brush and 'flow' of the airbrush, other functions like pasteup (cut and paste) the pressure increased the sensitivity of moving objects on screen. In the later Express models you could use the pressure and pen direction to control many other parameters like brush size, colour, opacity and brush direction (for use with custom brushes)
Does it have an undo button? I can only imagine needing to redo the entire thing if you mess up!
No, the Paintbox was famous for not having one. You would use the current picture with the 'Old' and 'New' picture stores to manage your own undo!
DextersLab2013 Regardless, that's just like painting an actual picture then!
So much nostalgia. I learned Paintbox at college in the late Eighties and worked with Henry editors in the early nineties.
A couple of years ago I downloaded the Compass software from the Quantel website before it disappeared, but never got it working.
Is there any way to emulate the system in software on a modern PC?
Always great to hear from an ex-quantel user. Sadly there is no emulator, though i am working with someone else to hopefully emulate the DPB-7000 'Classic' Paintbox. The only way to see or use a Paintbox now is to have the real thing and there's only a handful of systems left running.
Wanna see animations on this! ;)
Yes, i do too. Plans are afoot for the Ramcorder and my other v-series chassis so we can get 12 seconds of animated video!
Hopefully you don't get too many people asking for custom-made animated intros for their videos!
gnar
Please help,what kind of fonts they used in Quantel Paintbox Henry,please make a short video where we can see all the fonts.Please.
There are around 1000 fonts available, it's not really practical!
@@DextersTechLab thanks for the respond I understand that you're too busy person but please make a short video with the fonts of Quantel Paintbox Henry when you have time.I will probaly never have a chance to see that software in this life,please help me.I will be grateful to you rest of my life.
@@DextersTechLab just scrow the fonts names,do not open them.
Whoooaaaah this thing was really really advanced and ahead of it’s time, we still cannot do this on our nintendo switch.
Wow Never saw this before, I suppose it cannot be set to start up showing a new page.
The start-up screen? Yes that can be changed to a custom image or just a blank screen.
DextersLab2013 OK
Interesting, Photoshop in hardware!
Indeed! This is why Quantel tried to sue Adobe for patent infringements (and lost!).
Sad, but then, that's how progress happens. What used to be an industry standard nobody could afford on a consumer level finally became affordable (and portable) in the long run. But yeah, hardware version of what Photoshop is was what we had back then when mammoths like this were around.
Of course now I wish the Paintbox was emulated these days! Love to see what kind of vaporwave masterpieces could be created that way!
a handful of M68000 can do what an i7 can't
@@mustangrt8866 An i7 can certainly do that, and in HD, too. There was a lot of extra hardware around those old 68000 chips.
if you need a BNC to Mini-DIN cable for the Blackmagic device, let me know. I am selling them on ebay in taylor made sizes, but I am willing to send you one for free.
Thanks for the offer, i will email you.
where the hell is D D
Locked in her room out of my way!
What
Haha .. Photoshop avant la lettre