The Full Monty - Quantel launches iQ

Quantel Inc.'s new product iQ looks like the best chance yet for the company to emulate its glory days when Harry and Henry ruled high end post. It's described as a new platform for co-operative content creation, and marks a new way of building systems for Quantel.

iQ is the first full implementation of Quantel's Monty technology, which was previewed at NAB several years ago, enabling what Quantel calls ‘resolution co-existence' in one system.

Last July, Quantel became an independent company again in a $75 million management buyout from parent company Carlton Communications, which gave the present management team 55 per cent ownership of the company. Led by executive chairman Richard Taylor and research director Paul Kellar, the team see iQ as the basis for Quantel's future development, and will launch the product publicly at IBC this week.

Partners help build platform
iQ combines the traditional strength of Quantel in making fast, dedicated video processing hardware, with a Windows NT component that links to software from other specialist suppliers.

The system will begin delivery in January 2001, and is currently priced at $500,000, which will include four hours of uncompressed high definition storage, plus the initial software packages Quantel has configured for the machine — Q-Edit, Q-Paint and Q-Scribe.

Q-Paint builds on the relationship Quantel developed with Alias Wavefront and integrates Maya paint effects into iQ as well as Quantel's own. The same approach is adopted with Q-Scribe, which combines Inscriber character generator software on the iQ system.

Other applications being written to iQ include Shake from Nothing Real, 5D's Monsters, Artel Soft's Boris FX Red, Photron's Primatte keyer and Ultimatte's keyer. At least one compositor will also be part of the package by launchtime.

From one to many
The openness of iQ to other software is a key feature of the product, which is being positioned as a central element in enabling cross facility working and enabling the sharing of creative tools from many sources, on one base platform.

"There's a trend away from big, expensive hero systems to partner systems, enabling a choice of different tools to be used for editing, paint, 3D and compositing," says Steve Owen, business manager for workstations at Quantel. "Teams of specialist artists often combine on single projects now — you can't do everything in one system from one company anymore."

IQ is seen as a product that will sit at the center of the creative workflow in a video facility, making a universal master and along the way, enabling the creative team to access any tools it wants, sharing material and re-purposing finished work to a variety of output formats.

The platform is HD and SD capable, and Quantel says there will be 2K and even 4K capable versions if there turns out to be a market for it. iQ will take in any HD or SD format, retaining each in its native state to avoid any concatenation problems.

"One of the starting points was the need for facilities to get into high definition — however, the budgets available will only be 20 to 30 per cent bigger than for standard definition, so the challenge was to build a system to allow facilities to make a business out of HD." Owns says.

Quantel's most open system to date
Quantel researched the market, asking users what they wanted from a new generation of equipment that combined dedicated video hardware with an unlimited variety of software tools. It even brought in a firm of independent industrial designers to research what interfaces creative operators preferred to use.

"As a result, we built iQ, which combines the openness of the software rich world of the PC, with the reliability and performance of purpose built hardware. Owen says. "iQ is the most open video processing platform there is – anyone can write for it."

The kernel of iQ is its system control, which involves two processing sides — Quantel and Windows 2000.

Company execs say iQ it uses each side for what it does best, with Quantel's reliability and processing power in no way compromised by Windows. It replaces Windows object manager with a Quantel object manager to ensure solid Quantel control over the processes.

"We've been very careful to isolate ourselves from Windows, so all the objects in use are Quantel's — that way we can guarantee performance," says Kellar. "It involved a lot of work to do that — but it's the best way to get the best out of Windows NT and the best out of Quantel."

Nick Radlo covers the European broadcast and production scene – you can reach him at nickradlo@compuserve.com.