Quantel is a corporation 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.
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 Olympics to generate a picture-in-picture inset of the Olympics flaming torch while the rest of the picture featured the runner entering the stadium.
In 1981, they released the Quantel paintbox , 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 #1 in the USA), which was used to generate their on-air weather maps during their first years of operation. MTV was also an early customer of the Paintbox as well.
In 1985, Quantel also 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 Fujitsu, and were connected to the Harry using a proprietary parallel interface, much like a modern-day redundant array of independent disks 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 1980 s digital storage technology not being as advanced as today, the Harry could only record 80 seconds of video, albeit encoded in full broadcast-quality, D1 (Sony)-style 8-bit CCIR 601 format. This aside, the Harry was quite an advanced machine, and the only system like it for its time.
Since 2000, Quantel has expanded even further, specializing in and is part of the integrated sQ offering. Picturebox sQ - a device that can play graphics sequences (clips) as well as the more tradional stillimages generated by the New Paintbox, joined the line-up in 2005.
= Timeline =
1981 Quantel_Paintbox
1982 Quantel_Mirage - 3D real-time video effects processor
1986 Harry - NLE
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 Pal frames (around 12 seconds)
1992 Henry - Effects editor.
1992 HAL - Video design suite.
1993 Dylan - Redundant array of independent disks disk storage for video
1993 Editbox - Online NLE.
1994 Clipbox - Multiuser video servers.
1995 Open Picturenet - Networking for Quantel products.
= External links =
[http://www.quantel.com Quantel s web site]
[http://www.quantel.com/domisphere/infopool.nsf/html/QuantelHistory Quantel History]