Just wanted to make a short post about my latest Quantel adventure as i thought some of you might find it interesting because it's certainly vintage!
The Ramcorder is a device that connects to a quantel paintbox (video painting system) that allows short video clips to be made.
It's connected to the paintbox by bt.601 digital video interfaces, either SDI or Parallel giving video in and out. The paintbox commands the Ramcorder to replay or record either single frames or real-time video through a RS232 control interface between the two.
The ramcorder was introduced in 1989 as a companion to the also new V-Series Quantel Paintbox and would have been used to generate TV graphics for large TV networks by rendering frames of video in non-realtime and writing them to the ramcorder where effects can be composited. The ramcorder can store 323 PAL or NTSC video frames (720*576 PAL / 720*488 NTSC) uncompressed in a YUV16 format.
Price i think would have been around £70,000 (after RAM prices settled in the early 1990s) so a Ramcorder + Paintbox system would have been around £140,000 when new.
Inside the chassis are six large PCBs; a CPU board, video i/o board and four ram store boards.
The CPU board contains a 6809 CPU, dual UART, diagnostics port, ROM and RAM.
The video i/o board contains logic to read/modify data within the store boards, there are also two add-on boards that generate the bt601 video data in parallel form using programmable logic (FPGA/CPLD) and also convert that to serial (SDI) video using ST Micro STV1601 & STV1602 serialiser/de-serialiser pairs.
The four store boards each contain 512 1megabit DRAMs making a total of 2048 in the system for 256MB total RAM. Ignoring the vias there are in excess of 10,000 through holes in the pcb.
There is also a short video on it on my youtube channel, looking inside and in use.