1990s Quantel Paintbox Repair

[dexters_lab]

I expect most people here know i have been repairing a 2nd generation Quantel Paintbox over the last few months.

It has been quite an adventure, but it is now working thanks to the help of many many people. This is a short video explaining a bit about the whole story start to finish 

Reversing the SecurityPAL thread:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/reversing-the-encoding-of-serial-numbers-into-pals-or-gals/

Original repair thread:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/quantel-paintbox-cpu-bus-errors/

[dexters_lab]

Now i have the paintbox working i will be wanting to make a video showing how it works, in doing this i wanted to get the best possible video quality from the paintbox.

The paintbox has analog and digital video i/o, but the digital outputs are parallel CCIR656

Thankfully in the haul of quantel parts i picked up a CCIR656 to SDI (SDI is a serialised version of 656) converter box made by Quantel, the serial output from this was then sent into a Blackmagic HyperDeck Shuttle (thanks to mikeselectricstuff!) which can record the raw stream as an uncompressed MOV

the attached is a grab from that digital video

[SeanB]

I think you are going to make better video from that than Quantel ever expected it to be able to make Mark.

Wonder how small and compact you could make a modern version, using more modern processing and chip designs, but with 4k resolution as well.

[dexters_lab]

I think you are going to make better video from that than Quantel ever expected it to be able to make Mark.

Wonder how small and compact you could make a modern version, using more modern processing and chip designs, but with 4k resolution as well.

yes, because so much footage of the paintbox has been transferred off video tape seeing some original output does make it look pretty damd good! Just a shame it's not HD!

I recon you could probably compress it down into an FPGA, so probably palm sized like a raspberry pi. User OzOnE was working on this for the original DPB-7000 because we have full schematics and there is very little custom logic in it, maybe one day!

[SeanB]

May not be HD, but likely could be as good as 720p in most cases. Broadcast video from a good in studio source, sent via a good well levelled signal path to a decent display is pretty good.

Your cup holder, when it was still a player, was capable of some really good video from the third generation master tapes I used on it. I copied them using SVHS metal tape and a SVHS connection as dubbing masters, and the fourth generation copy was still better than off air broadcasts. Even the tapes I did were good, and as a bonus were all Hifi stereo, as the recorders were all capable of it, so I connected it up as well and enabled it along with the longitudinal audio track. Sadly some of the masters were in need of downmixing to mono, as they had separate audio tracks, one speech audio and the other the rest, so sounded badly when played back in stereo, so they went mono.