Hardware For Sale/Trade

experienced people here that could enlighten me as to what the purpose of this system is

it's a PC... run windows, browse the internet, play solitare. all the typical PC stuff. Price is ridiculously high. this looks like a wintel 'server' which means it will suck a lot of power and have a junk video adapter as well... poor build quality by the looks of it (all no-name components, lots of unfinished metal on the inside). I've never heard of Quantel , would stay away from this one.

2x netburst 2.8ghz is probably comparable to a C2D 1.8ghz.

awwh man!

and i thought you spotted a hal or a henry, never seen em on beebay

gotta check my eyesight again…

btw emGee, ever used a quantel box back in the day? i did briefly

fu wrote: ... i thought you spotted a hal or a henry ...

I'm 'enery the eighth I am,
'enery the eighth I am I am ...

with their (back in the day) lineup of harry, henry etc i always thought that their next machine would be ophelia

…rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind

(but they went for male-only names)

The case on that looks exactlly like the one that our crappy SuperMicro cluster headnode is in.
I might have been built by Streamline.

Run!!!!

!m!

That is a quantel sQ edit plus system. Its a client for a bigger sQ server system.

the onboard audio isnt used at all, it has its own SDI video/audio i/o - that that machine apparantly is missing. most clients dont have i/o, most of the i/o is done from the server.

the sQ server is an amazing product. for every frame of video it has a hi res compressed image, and a low res browse quality image. regular view/edit clients work with the low res browse level media, but since all the metadata is managed in a database, it always matches to the hi res broadcast quality media.

so for example, the qrecord operator starts a feed coming in. after the first frame hits the server, the clip is immidiatly availible to all view/edit/etc clients to work with in real time. a producer can watch the feed in, subclip out the bytes then want, and publish that clip back to the server.

then somebody on the edit plus can pull up the edit, do color corrects, effects, finish the cut, whatever, and publish it back to the server. any new media created (effects, etc) go back up to the server as well. The final edit can be played out live, before the feed coming in is ever even finished.

more info here:
http://www.quantel.com/page.php?u=4a559 ... df049cb08a

its an AMAZING system to work on in a fast paced news environment.

btw genQ products have a custom video board with quantel custom FPGAs, etc. this unit is just missing it.

yup, i'm on there too

i would love an old v series pantbox.
actually what i really want is a domino

http://www.tv-ark.org.uk/mivana/mediapl ... 0&type=mp4

eM, sorry can't brief you much on the inside tech side, i'm just an artist.

iirc some of their machines used to run on motorolas 68k (but everything was custom back then), which is a chip that i've heard the most stories about (from tech-talk to conspiracy theories)

their paintbox that jdanna mentions was always connected to a Mac acting as a peripheral server (at least in the studio setups i've been working back then), pushing/pulling stills/freeze frames from/to the art dept.

i used quantells briefly during my early (and short-lived) tv days, i wouldn't call them extremely hard to use as an overall experience tho i'm not sure if the guys that used to support or pay for them would say the same thing

edit: here's a hysterically-paced piece that sows some typical old-school quantel setup

eMGee wrote: Another great video — during the product's heyday — has to be the Computer Chronicles episode from 1984 , which also features the similarly MC68K-powered IRIS 3000 , a must-see!

nit: the machine in the Computer Chronicles episode is an IRIS 1200 terminal, loading standalone demos from the floppy disk drive.

eMGee wrote: ... there's really nothing out there on the usual auction sites.

c'mon eM, that'd spoil everything...

use your charm and hang around tv buildings, make friends w/ janitor or seduce the receptionist and get to the storage room. room labelled B1 has all the stuff to be recycled/scraped. when inside, you know what to do

eMGee wrote: Who was conspiring against who...?

everyone! the epitome of the c.theories was that it was so good that a major force kicked in to use it all for itself, no mass market anymore. probably because there were so many implementations based on 68k, i'd use 3 different ones daily back then:

-how old are you? i mean, do you remember how long it used to take the typical home computer just to display a 4-colour blob on screen? and what happened when you tried to drag its window from one side to the other? some of them were based on 68k

-Quadra 840av or the superpimped NeXT cube (called Dimension something), live video feed w/ texture señor? based on 68k, different price tag.

-and then on the high end there was Quantel/SGI, making use of 68k chips for a very specific part of the a/v industry and a price tag not to be funked with.

if it still had the quantel boards, software, and dongle it would be worth buying - but as is, its a shitty supermicro pc that isnt worth the cost of shipping.

jdanna wrote: i would love an old v series pantbox.
actually what i really want is a domino

If you are serious, I can hook you up with someone in the UK.
Then you can use my scan/record service to get pictures in and out of it!

eMGee wrote: If not I'd be interested, I've been looking for a cheap Paintbox system for years.

Actually I was thinking I could hook an interested party up with someone in the UK who wouldn't mind shifting a Domino workstation. You do see Paintboxes on ebay from time to time; I nearly bought one from Spain, but I've no use for one and don't really want one for playing with. It went for pretty small money too. You definitely wouldn't want a first generation one - from memory it is pretty much a 39U rack full of 80's TTL chippery which comsumes kilowatts of electricity - but then again you might! This is the same group of people collecting SGIs which consume kilowatts of 'leccy.

For all Quantel stuff I'd recommend talking to Simon Tillyer at Effect Systems (right behind one of the old Quantel buildings in Newbury) to see if he wants to get rid of some old stuff now that he has no more Dominos on support contract.

www.effect.co.uk