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Quantel was a company based in the United Kingdom and founded in 1973 that designed and manufactured digital production equipment for the broadcast television, video production and motion picture industries. They were headquartered in Newbury, Berkshire. The name Quantel comes from Quantised Television which is making reference to the process of converting a television picture into a digital signal. ==History == Quantel founder, Peter Michael, had previously founded Micro Consultants Group (MCG). MCG had pioneered a range of fast data conversion products that could be used for converting video signals from analog to digital and back to analog. These devices found use in many early Quantel products. In the 1980s, Peter Michael merged Quantel (along with his other interests) into the UEI Group of companies. Peter became Chairman with Quantel remaining a privately owned company of the publicly quoted UEI. Under the leadership of Richard Taylor OBE, chairman from 1975 and Paul Kellar MBE, Quantel 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. Framestore technology provided the cornerstone for the future development of digital television products. * In 1981, they released the ''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 number '1' in the USA), which was used to generate their on-air weather maps during their first years of operation. MTV was another early customer of the Paintbox. * When the BBC weather department decided to move from magnetic weather symbols on a board in 1985 to a complete digital solution they used modified Paintboxes which were controlled via Apple Lisa computers.〔"A Change In The Weather", BBC Television, broadcast Mon 18 Feb 1985〕 The weather presenter then stood in front of a blue screen holding a button that was connected to the Lisa; which then in turn communicated with the Paintbox to bring up the next slide. * In 1985, Quantel 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 RAID 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 technical constraints of the time, the Harry could only record 80 seconds of video, albeit encoded in full broadcast-quality, uncompressed D1-style 8-bit CCIR 601 format. This aside, the Harry was quite an advanced machine, and the only system like it for its time. * In 1992, Quantel released "Henry" the first Multi Layer compositing system that became the worldwide industry standard for commercials production and went on win the British Government's Queens Award for Export Achievement, Quantel's 9th such award. This period until 1998 marked the high point of the Company's profitability, size and market position, placing it in the top 5 of Broadcast vendors. The company had a global presence with major offices, staff and facilities on the east and west coast of the USA, in Paris, Tokyo, London, Seoul, Hong Kong and Sydney, plus other overseas resources. There was a private air operation - Quantel Aviation - based in Farnborough which included a private Citation IV executive jet. However, as software based products began to gain ground in Quantel's then core businesses of compositing, graphics and news editing, the company was not able to maintain this position. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Quantel」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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