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Laughably OT: Can you ID an old graphics system?
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of course, no one has brought up Quantel. It’s hard to believe that a Quantel Painbox was $250,000. So were single channel AMPEX ADO’s. And people would have 4 channels of them !
Of course what bothered me (everything bothers me) – is when I started to talk about Adobe Photoshop, and the Painbox guys would call it “Photo-toy”. All these guys that made fun of all the “cheap stuff” (including AVID, etc.) – well, they are all UNEMPLOYED now. And since this is the Final Cut Pro X debate forum – all the guys that make fun of FCP X – well, just wait and see what happens. (and I am no great fan of FCP X – but I see what is happening).
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
[Bob Zelin] “when I started to talk about Adobe Photoshop, and the Painbox guys would call it “Photo-toy”. All these guys that made fun of all the “cheap stuff” (including AVID, etc.) – well, they are all UNEMPLOYED now. And since this is the Final Cut Pro X debate forum – all the guys that make fun of FCP X – well, just wait and see what happens. (and I am no great fan of FCP X – but I see what is happening). “
Hell, it happened with FCP-Legacy and even happened to me when cutting on an early Avid. Had to render a dissolve and a linear guy walked by and smugly said his Sony switcher would do a dissolve in real time. Totally missing the forest view.
Scott Witthaus
Visual Storyteller – FCPX, Premiere
https://vimeo.com/channels/1322525
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Scott Thomas] ” Mike Fayette was a very kind host “
Mike was a rock star. Didn’t really know him personally, but he was legendary in Chicago. Same for Post FX.
[Scott Thomas] “Century III in late 1997”
Did Century III absorb what was left of TeleMation? Or was it just that the TeleMation/Chicago sort-of-boss (John…something with a ‘D’) ended up there when Chicago shut down?
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[Bob Zelin] “And people would have 4 channels of them !”
Don’t forget the combiner. So you could link all 4 channels into one output.
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[Scott Witthaus] “mugly said his Sony switcher would do a dissolve in real time.”
Sure it could. After he dubbed his next shot to a b-roll reel… (or had his tape op do it for him!)
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[Bob Zelin] “It’s hard to believe that a Quantel Painbox was $250,000.”
We would buy so much Sony gear each year that when our company went to NAB (sometimes 15 of us), Sony would rent out a Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse room for a night and basically said “have at it”. And then would take those of us who golf out to exclusive desert courses. Hell, $15,000 + was small change for the amount of gear we were buying.
Ah, the good old days….they are good and gone now.
Scott Witthaus
Visual Storyteller – FCPX, Premiere
https://vimeo.com/channels/1322525
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Scott Witthaus] “[Bob Zelin] “It’s hard to believe that a Quantel Painbox was $250,000.”
….Hell, $15,000 + [to wine/dine/golf us] was small change for the amount of gear we were buying. “
It’s not hard to believe at all. It has always been the case that rigorously-compliant gear that could quickly move enormous amounts of data always cost plenty. That said, Paintbox’s price was considered a shocking breakthrough, because one person could now do in more or less real time what had taken a team weeks to do — if it could be done at all. Let’s not forget that the REAL revolution of Paintbox is that it allowed people to do what had previously not been practical at any scale of time and money otherwise. That’s why everybody HAD to have one.
And billing at $1000/hr or more as was common well into the 21st century for rooms like this, you were in pure profit mode in a matter of months, . There’d never been an ROI even vaguely like it — not just because of what it cost, but because of how much you could MAKE with it.
Here’s a great launch video for the 1990 iteration of Paintbox. It’s 5 minutes long, and worth every second of your time. The first 2 minutes or so takes you through the 80s, and what a breakthrough it was, and how ubiquitous it was.
You can look at this and laugh now (as indeed I did just now), but don’t forget that as late as 1998, After Effects still had one undo, no editable text, pretty much every operation was destructive, no 3D space, no paint, no roto, on and on and on. People could do miracles with it, yes, but it wasn’t necessarily easy. (Easy to start? Yes. Easy to master? No.) And at the end of it, miracle in hand, you couldn’t charge more than a fraction for it as something similar but even less sophisticated that someone completed in a fraction of the time with a Paintbox.
Where the math started to change was when you could do things in AE that were impossible in hardware, similar to what Paintbox had done 20 years earlier.
Anyway, this is a trip. Watch it all. You’ll dig it.
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It’s worth remembering that Quantel is still around, albeit under the SAM banner, but they’re still getting high-five figures into six figures for boxes for the same reason they always have: you can do cool stuff fast. We don’t hear about ’em much because they wisely got out of the stock market so nobody would yap about irrelevant nonsense like how many of ’em were sold. Wall St. doesn’t know what to do with a company that only sells a couple of hundred (or less) really expensive things, so they wisely stopped trying to teach Wall St. the basics of business. You only need to make more than you spend and have happy customers.
That’s not enough for the market anymore, so Quantel / SAM wisely walked away to focus on doing what they do. Very quietly serving their mature niche market, selling to people who are still billing enough to make this stuff a bargain.
Another observation about price along these lines. I spent 2003-2006 at Avid sitting next to the product manager for Avid DS. I’d say 10% of his calls were from people who wanted Avid to get on the stick with development (we need more features! we need more marketing support!), but 90% of his calls were people SCREAMING that $145,000 (including storage) was TOO LOW A PRICE. When I say “screaming”, I’m not kidding. “Our clients read trade magazines, they go to NAB, they know how much this stuff costs, and I’m having to cut my prices by two-thirds because you want to come in so much cheaper than Flame — it’s KILLING us.”
THAT’s why that product failed. I saw how much development and marketing effort it got. PLENTY. But it got eaten from below by After Effects and DaVinci Resolve, got eaten from above by Discreet (who’s also doing just fine, thanks), and its target customer couldn’t monetize a product that cost so little.
That’s always going to be the yin and yang of graphics hardware market dynamics. Buy something cheap, make a little. Buy something expensive, make a lot.
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this is an AVID DS Story
I certainly don’t recall the year (some time in the 2000’s), but it was at Electronic Arts (Tiburon). Electronic Arts purchased two or three AVID DS systems and hired Kelly Austin from The Golf Channel to be the DS Artist. Kelly was one of the few people that knew how to use it, and was good at it. A few years later, a directive from management came down to GET RID of the AVID DS systems, and buy ANYTHING ELSE – why ? Because the AVID DS Support contracts were $9000 per year per system, and Electronic Arts was not going to pay for this. SO – what did they choose – FCP – just like everyone else in the early – mid 2000’s. The acceptance of FCP was a financial decision (and it was actually a pretty good program) while all the “old school” AVID editors all said “FCP sucks” (hey – those old school AVID editors that still exist in LA STILL say that FCP sucks – and everything else sucks).And for the three youngsters reading this thread written by old men – that free Davinci Resolve that you are now using – that was made in Coral Springs Florida, a Davinci Resolve system (with SGI computer) cost $400,000.
Today – free (ok, 35 grand if you get the full control panel). And the Teranex (made right here on Sand Lake Road in Orlando Florida) was between $60,000 and $80,000 – now $1695 new.Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
[Bob Zelin] “And for the three youngsters reading this thread written by old men – that free Davinci Resolve that you are now using – that was made in Coral Springs Florida, a Davinci Resolve system (with SGI computer) cost $400,000.
Today – free (ok, 35 grand if you get the full control panel). And the Teranex (made right here on Sand Lake Road in Orlando Florida) was between $60,000 and $80,000 – now $1695 new. “This is of course the absolutely true flipside of what I was just saying, that you can still spend bigger money on systems in order to MAKE bigger money….
….but if you’re in a position with limited upside, my goodness gracious, why spend more than this??? The prices are shockingly low to me, but equally shocking that the stuff itself is terrific at that price. Not only did Blackmagic drop the price of of Teranex by north of $70,000 in some cases, they made them smaller, lighter, quieter, and dramatically increased IO and format support. Astonishing.
When we spoke to Grant in 2009 following the DaVinci acquisition, he said, “You know what, there’s almost no margin in the control panel. That’s how much it costs to make a control panel that good, so I’m not going to be able to reduce the price of that in any major way. I don’t know for sure yet, and I’ll keep digging, but maybe none at all.” And he’s right. People who spend even a tiny bit of time on those things understand exactly why the big control surface costs what it does.
DaVinci’s model was always to charge as little as they could for THAT, and as much as possible for all the rest — software, support, etc. — which of course Grant is interested in charging as LITTLE as possible for. If 4K is good enough for you, then you downloading it for free is good enough for Grant. Or heck, buy a camera for crazy short money and get the “expensive” version free, too. That’ll work.
The additional miracle to me is that Grant has made compelling smaller versions of the control surfaces for prices that really do strike me as nutso compared to similarly-scaled products.
But I’ll bring it back to Quantel again and note that Grant is free to run his company on the business model that works for him — which I can briefly summarize in words he wouldn’t use to say, “Profit to enable anything more than paying people well and funding future development is theft” ???? — and Quantel is free to develop the products their customers need, no more and no less, because they’re not on the hamster wheel of public trading.
Not that there’s not room for both kinds of companies in my own product portfolio (there absolutely is), but I’ve enjoyed spending less time watching the stock price of the companies whose products I might consider using, and paying more attention to the companies who are smart enough not to play that game.
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Century III was Boston and Orlando based. Oliver Peters probably knows more about them. I worked with a couple of former CIII editors when I lived in Orlando. I never heard of a TeleMation connection. There have been CIII tribute websites in the past.
Let me look… Okay, Oliver knows a lot about CIII. This was written by his wife…
Orlando Memory: Century III TeleproductionsI’m not sure what the scene is like there now, but when I was in Orlando, there was all this hope that it would become Hollywood East. We did news stories about it constantly. A friend of mine was doing live production for Nickelodeon on the Universal lot.
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