Quantel were a small company based in Newbury, England that had achieved success by developing early digital video products, notably the innovation of being able to combine two live video feeds by using a framestore.
The development of a Paint Box started in the late 70's but the first prototype (utilizing the Intellect hardware) was too jagged quality for Broadcast TV, so the project was completely abandoned and none of the ideas or tech crossed over to the second prototype. Quantel's Richard Taylor had clearly identified that the fundamental challenge was to create a system which could 'paint' a digital line that replicated the subtleties and speed of a real painted line. Without a solution to this issue, realistic digital pictures were impossible but in 1980, Quantel started work on their second prototype and this time they cracked it.
Because Quantel had worked out a way to simultaneously combine two video images, a brush of colour could be marked onto the existing underlying image, repeated rapidly and overlapping previous marks, as the brush was moved by the artist. A vital part of this digital studio, that even Alvy Ray-Smith at NYIT gave up trying to make work properly, was to vary the application amount of each mark by using a pressure-sensitive pen, rather than by a click on-off mouse or keyboard. If Quantel had not also solved this problem, the artist's skills would have been severely restricted.
From this base idea, flowed the whole digital studio. By changing the texture of the brush, different media such as chalk could be replicated and adding the ability to define geometric shapes meant that it included a graphic studio.
In 1980, the computational limitation of available hardware was a big issue to overcome. The huge, state of the art hard drive was only 330Mb, so the real-time complex processing had to be spread over 25 circuit boards, custom made by Quantel and each containing over a dozen specially programmed chips. The stunningly complex machine was designed to run in TV design studios and so had to be incredibly reliable, broadcast quality and fast, with no observable delay between the time the artist moving the stylus and the cursor on the screen responding.
The final piece of the jigsaw was to create an artist friendly, non-tech interface. Creative Martin Holbrook was brought in and it is a testament to the beauty of the stylus-operated menu system he created that his artist-friendly UI would remain largely unchanged for the next 20 years.
The Paintbox was launched to a select number of potential buyers in a hotel suite during the National Association of Broadcasters annual show in Las Vegas on April 12th, 1981. Competitors couldn't believe the speed and quality of the Paint Box, with the renowned digital paint expert Alvy Ray-Smith writing "There was no other
way to get the speed they were showing at that
time, in the early 1980s. The software-driven,
general-purpose computers that we had used
throughout the 1970s and would continue to
use for decades were simply not yet fast enough
to allow someone to sweep a large brush of
paint across a screen and have the computation
keep pace with the human. (They easily do this
now, but not then.) And this was part of the
Quantel demonstration of Paintbox."
Although (hence the name)it could only paint, it was an instant hit, with the first order placed by the pre-launch Weather Channel but multiple units were also purchased that year by ABC, NBC and other major networks across the world such as the BBC followed suit. Though the sticker price was $158,500 each ($575,000 in today's money) plus additional costs for peripherals such as monitor, external storage drives and an artist to work on it, the Paintbox was a sound investment because it not only drastically reduced the time it previously took to hand make all the TV graphics and titles but the bright, colorful, brand new graphics attracted new viewers, which attracted more income from advertisers.
In typical Quantel style, they didn't considered this a Paintbox and always stated that 1982 was the launch year because by then it was no longer a limited, though groundbreaking, demonstration prototype.
By 1982, the Paint Box had graphics and was able to create masks, so could cut out, and finely manipulate any part of an image. Quantel was the first large computer graphics manufacturer to convince traditional type foundries to license their fonts available digitaly and by 1983, upgrades to the Paintbox created a complete painting, graphic design, typesetting, photo manipulation and animation studio in one seamlessly intercommunicating digital package. Something that is unheard of even today.
The ultimate digital studio was now complete.
Independent production houses such as Charlex and Broadway Video in NYC and CAL Videographics and Moving Picture Company in London made a fortune by purchasing the Paintbox and creating amazing new TV commercials and music videos on it.
The Paintbox was the first user friendly, real time, 24 bit, full color, broadcast quality, pressure sensitive stylus operated, digital studio in the world and it would be nearly a decade before it faced any serious competition. By that time, the Paintbox was THE industry standard - cheaper, more compact and complete with a range of related Quantel machines which could also edit, animate and create 3D.
PAINTBOX TIMELINE
1981 - DPB-7000 Digital Paint Box prototype
Though other machines were available, they all had shortcomings such as complex interfaces or jaggy lines. The Paint Box was a bespoke closed-system machine that Quantel's genius hardware and software engineers squeezed every ounce of computing power out of the best available components of the time.
None of this was cheap, with an early Paintbox costing around $157,800 plus monitor and other peripherals but each one soon paid for itself by vastly reducing the time it took to create TV graphics and by attracting new viewers (and therefore more advertising dollars) to any broadcaster who bought one.
1983 - DPB-7000 Digital Paint Box
This is the fully-fledged Paintbox that became the workhorse in countless Broadcast TV studios and video post-production facilities around the world.
1984 - GPB Graphic Paintbox
By adding more framestores to a DPB7000, Quantel first demonstrated to an amazed crowd at IPEX '84 in Birmingham, UK that it was possible to create a photo quality version of the video Paintbox. Digital photography was in its infancy, with everything still shot on film but once it had been scanned, the Graphic Paintbox could manipulate images as fast and easily as the DPB could manipulate video. Incredibly expensive at $400,000 each, the Graphic Paintbox nonetheless set the standard in the reprographic and digital retouching industry for years, creating iconic images 5 years before Photoshop 1.0 was even launched.
1985 - The Military Paintbox
Quantel's failed attempt to break into the tightly restricted defence and government supply field by combining a Paintbox with their aircraft-mounted Scanline sensor, Crystal image enhancer and Revue data store. As is listed on this exhibition stand, Quantel hoped the system could be used for analyzing airborn pollution, coastguard surveillance, sonar signals and weapons testing analysis, as well as the usual Paintbox graphics and image manipulation purposes. The Military Paintbox was not a sales success and was a very short-lived distraction from their core Broadcast Sector business.
1989 - V-Series Paintbox
The original Paint Box was large and expensive but in 1989, Quantel launched a cheaper and more compact version, named because it followed the Version 4 software upgrade on the DPB. By this time, the Paintbox was so much of an industry standard, it had become one word and a verb for digital image manipulation, much like Photoshop is today. A Paintbox Junior, without any video input or output, could be bought for $60,000 and a basic V-Series video Paintbox started at $90,000
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1990 - Harriet
Quantel added a video storage device called a Ramcorder to the Paintbox, enabling the user to store and manipulate 12 seconds of video. Though this doesn't sound much, the main task for these machines was to create graphics and animation for TV show titles, intros and graphics, which were only a few seconds in length anyway. The Harriet was also excellent for Rotoscoping and the 12 second clips could be edited into longer sequences if required.
1994 - Printbox Quantel expanded their photo quality Paintbox range with the Printbox, aimed at the publishing industry. As can be seen in this demo, Printbox could fully integrate with Apple and other competitor devices/software using their Courier Image Management workflow.
1995 - GPB2
As with the video Paintbox, Quantel managed to shrink the original huge GPB down to a cheaper desktop size but Adobe's Photoshop had by this time become good enough software to make it hard to justify the .
V-Series variants
By adding various extra features, Quantel sold the V-Series into the early 2000's. A HD version of the Paintbox has a lot of internal technical differences but versions such as Express, Bravo, Esprit and F.A.T. were often marketing name changes rather than vastly different machines, though Quantel did notably add Java, TCP networking and over a thousand fonts to the Paintbox to try and maintain its appeal.
However, Quantel was fighting a losing battle against much cheaper Mac/PC based software solutions such as Photoshop.