The big box of magic
In 1989 the British rock band Queen released their thirteenth studio album, ‘The Miracle’. The LP cover art, designed by Richard Gray, was a really groundbreaking creative piece of ‘Photoshopping’, with the headshots of the four band members ‘retouched’ into each other to make this weird, but realistic and striking visual vignette:
The REALLY interesting thing was that, at this point, Photoshop had not yet been invented.
Richard Gray was lucky enough to be able to have a go on a new piece of technology, a system designed and built by Quantel, a British company, founded in 1973, that designed and manufactured digital production equipment for broadcast television, video production and film.
Its wasn’t the first digital painting system, Richard Shoup (XeroxPARC) created the 8-bit paint program ‘SuperPaint’ in 1973 and Alvy Ray Smith (co-founder of Pixar) created the first 24-bit RGB paint system ‘Paint3' in 1977. Both men were also later to be prominent in the legal challenges that Quantel faced (more on that later…)
Paintbox was the first time bespoke hardware had been created for the purpose of digital painting, and the first to use a pressure sensitive pen.
Quantel (QUANtized TELevision) invented several technical broadcast devices, in particular, digital frame stores. It was Quantel that first allowed broadcasters to generate a live picture-in-picture inset in the 1976 Montreal Olympic games.
The technology was so advanced it was 10 years before they faced any real competition.
Quantel launched the Paintbox in 1981, a 24-bit, true colour, real time, broadcast quality graphics computer which cost a cool quarter of a million dollars. The first customer was the Weather channel, who had previously used stick-on weather symbols on their wall map, now were able to do it all digitally and thus making broadcasting history.
Shortly after, the BBC adopted this technology, and, along with the new Apple Lisa computer, their presenters delivered the weather report for the morning news, standing in front of chromakey screens with a clicker device. A quantum leap in communications and a proper milestone in television history.
After this came small effects shots in Doctor Who:
and then this wonderful BBC documentary in 1986:
The 14” Winchester hard drive hard drive was massive, heavy and could only store 335 MB. Thats six seconds of broadcast quality, standard definition 30 fps interlaced video. The operators would then need to copy that onto large heavy magnetic tapes so they could wipe the drive and start again.
The technology was so advanced that in order for it to be fast enough to draw using the pressure sensitive stylus in real time, the entire ‘software’ was entirely done in hardware. The box was essentially a vast array of accelerated graphics cards.
As for the interface and ‘design’ tools, which were by todays standards, rudimentary, well the whole thing was a retro graphics enthusiasts’ wet dream.
Also some the tech inadvertently gave birth to the entire 80’s TV aesthetic.
According to design lore, the ’80s look was created by the Memphis design movement, led by Italian architect Ettore Sottsass.
But few could argue that this new technology, now the de-facto TV graphics standard, was also standardising and perpetuating the aesthetic, as technology often does with design.
MTV owes a a lot to the Paintbox. It launched in the same year, and almost all of its graphical style was defined by the system.
Music videos were all over it, heres one from Sting:
The most successful and well known music video was Dire Straits ‘Money for Nothing’:
Altho the early and groundbreaking 3D work was created using a used a Bosch FGS-4000 CGI system, the rest of the ‘painted on frames’ look was the Paintbox.
There were a few issues, the price was exorbitant, it cost 300 a day to hire the kit and another 300 to hire an ‘operator’, and there weren’t many of either readily available. It stayed the preserve of wealthy TV companies and high end promo/ident work.
Its was fun while it lasted
Like most technology, there is always something around the corner that will change the game. Photoshop was invented in the late 80’s, licensed to Adobe and that begat a series of legal challenges for patent infringement, that ultimately, Quantel lost due to clear evidence from Richard Shoup and Alvy Ray Smith (remember them?) who demonstrated that the features of the system such as the ‘digital painting’ and the menus predated the Paintbox. Patents for the hardware were easier to protect but going into the 90’s the growing PC market and a copy of Photoshop, along with loads of other software based solutions, quickly rendered the Paintbox obsolete.
There is reportedly only one remaining example of the original series Paintbox (DPB-7001) in the world. It’s being restored by Mark Nias of Dexters Lab:
So next time you hear the verb ‘to Photoshop’ just imagine, if it wasn’t for John Knoll and his brother inventing the wonder that is Photoshop, we would all be ‘Paintboxing’
Thanks for reading!
