Quantel DPB-7001 'Classic' Paintbox

[dexters_lab]

Looking into the hardware of the original DPB 'Classic' Paintbox, this is quite an amazing bit of hardware and i believe to be historically important both in the computing and tv history fields.

The DPB-7000/1 was the first 'paintbox', introduced at NAB in 1981 and cost £120,000 although it wasn't the first video painting system it was the most influential and a huge success for Quantel allowing artists to create TV graphics without the use of physical drawings, letraset and rostrum cameras it also allowed the editing of stills taken from existing video. When combined with the later systems like Encore, Mirage and Harry it formed a hugely powerful system able to perform multi-layer video compositing in the mid 1980s.

The paintbox system is a 7U rack unit containing connection ports and PSU in the rear and a bay of cards in the front. The system is controlled by a Motorola 68000 CPU with ROM and RAM spread across two computer cards. The software is contained in EPROM and has 512kb of working RAM. The remaining cards which are mostly based on 74x series logic, bit-slice processors along with a small number of programmable logic devices like PAL/GALs perform the painting operations, framestores, video input and output and disk interfacing etc. The two framestores contain nearly 4Mb RAM which for 1981 was a considerable amount! Video input and output is analog Composite PAL or RGB+Sync at full frame resolution (PAL 720*576)

Peripherals include a large drawing tablet with a wired pen, 8" floppy drive, 14" hard disk and a keyboard

Hopefully if the psu doesn't go bang on me, i'll be posting progress as i try and get some life out of this machine...

[oPossum]

[Zbig]

Urm, yeah, Mark/dexters_lab is the guy who was Retro Man Cave guy's host in that video...

[oPossum]

Urm, yeah, Mark/dexters_lab is the guy who was Retro Man Cave guy's host in that video...

Urm, yeah, that is why it is posted in this thread.

[Zbig]

Urm, yeah, that is why it is posted in this thread.

Ok, fair enough It seemed as if you were providing OP another source of information on the subject. That's why it helps to put a word or two of context/explanation instead of just dropping a link

[oPossum]

I probably should have at least posted a brief explanation, such as "Dexter gets his 5 minutes of fame."

In my defense, forum policy seems to be:

• Video must be posted without comment
• Video must be at least 20 minutes long
• Everyone is expected to watch the whole video before commenting
• Comments should not reveal anything about the content of the video

[dexters_lab]

lol, video link posting etiquette aside...

it was really great making the video with Neil from RMC, there could be some interesting developments come from it!

[dexters_lab]

Sorry for bumping an old thread  but there has been significant progress made in the DPB restoration.

Because it's the 40th anniversary of the DPB-7001. Having being previewed as a prototype in New York in 1981, at the beginning of the year i decided i should try and do something with it.

Right now the DPB can start from floppy, i can get into the painting functions and it appears now to be working ok, with a few caveats.

There is still a lot to do, i would like to make this into a system i can eventually take to retro computing shows and have people use it so it needs to be reliable.

I have released 4 videos so far on it, these are not a documentation of every step but more of periodic updates to the process as i went through and got it booting, links to them are below, there's also some screen captures of the video output. Remarkable quality output considering this was released in 1982!

I would like to say a big thank you to those that have helped so far 

In summary there was a four major things wrong with it:
1: PSU Fault: No output from the original HiFlex PSU
Remedy: Replaced PSU with two Astec MP8 PSUs integrating them into the original PSU chassis.

2: Card Backplane / hiway mis-aligned: The previous owner had disassembled the entire machine but hadn't assembled the backplane correctly, many cards did not align with the sockets.
Remedy: Re-assemble, align backplane, clean all sockets and edge connectors

3: Incorrect Components: The previous owner had replaced several tantalum capacitors. Some of which were the wrong values which resulted in the CPU reset circuit holding the CPU in reset.
Remedy: Replaced with correct parts.

4: Bad EPROM: One eprom had gone bad and was touch / vibration sensitive.
Remedy: Replaced.

Now it seems i can boot the system i will be looking at the following issues that need to be resolved:
Replace the 8" floppy with something solid-state & backup all floppies.
Replace the 14" hard disk with something solid state
Replace various blown components on the video input/capture cards & test


The Videos:
Part 4:


Part 3:


Part 2:


Part 1:

[dexters_lab]

A lot has been happening recently, i have been building a board that replaces one of the original cards in the DPB so we can hopefully have a hard and floppy disk emulator based around the DE-10 Nano platform.

I still need to finish the board and OzOnE needs to complete the FPGA code and then we need to see if it works!

[Alex Eisenhut]

You think a music video like this from ~1982ish would have been made with a Paintbox?

[dexters_lab]

No, afraid not. But it does look like Quantel effects from a Quantel DPE5000, a digital effects machine which predates the DPB by a few years.

Paintbox was a still frame machine, it wasn't until Quantel Harry in the mid 80s, enabling it do proper video composition. Michael Jackson's Leave Me Alone video being a notable example.

[dexters_lab]

You think a music video like this from ~1982ish would have been made with a Paintbox?

just to follow up on this now i am not typing on my phone....

The DPE-5000 is a single channel video effects unit, it takes real-time video, applies the effect and outputs it to be recorded onto tape, i have attached a page from the brochure. It can do all the Squeeze, Zoom effects typical from the time and key it over video which you can see. Note only one moving effect is on screen at a time.

For the trails effect, they would take the input video key out the black and feedback through a mixer. You can see the crunchy black key around the edges of the trails.

As said in my other post, Paintbox needed still frame digital storage to free it from doing just still images. So you could rotoscope individual frames and write them one at a time out to a store. It wasn't until the mid 1980s could you read a single frame, edit it and write it back without disturbing the adjacent frames.

The neon light effects in Dire Straights Money For Nothing was done with Paintbox rotoscoped individual frames