Lots of silicon: Broadcast Video Editing 1990s Style

[dexters_lab]

I have just dismantled a Quantel Editbox which performed broadcast quality, standard def non-linear video editing, effects etc during the 1990s

I was quite surprised the amount of stuff there was needed do do all this, considering what we can do on our PCs today. So i thought i would post up pics of all the processing boards and a rough count of the significantly sized ICs

CPUs: 7
FPGAs: 22
CPLDs: 177
Custom ASICs: 49
DSPs: 5
Logic Math (adders, multipliers, shift registers etc): 42

Cost when new, between £150,000 to £200,000 depending on the options you had with it. 

[bktemp]

CPUs: 7
FPGAs: 22
CPLDs: 177
Custom ASICs: 49
DSPs: 5
Logic Math (adders, multipliers, shift registers etc): 42

Wow! That is a lot of ASICs, FPGAs and CPLDs. I wonder how long it took to design all the custom logic.

[Messtechniker]

I was quite surprised the amount of stuff there was needed do do all this ...

I call such a "components mass grave"

Yours Messtechniker

[helius]

In IMG_5088, the modular jack at upper left is a 100baseTX Ethernet port, identified by the SMC controller.
In IMG_5093, there is a Ultra-Wide SCSI port in the same position, near the Qlogic controller. By these chips it would be 1995 or later.

One thing that I've noticed on several boards from that era are grid patterns in the unused area, as seen in IMG_5089 and IMG_5093. There is also crosshatching in IMG_5092, and stripes in IMG_5096. My hunch is that they were used to prevent warping from uneven copper loading, but I never really learned what they are for.

[jonovid]

I have just dismantled a Quantel Editbox which performed broadcast quality, standard def non-linear video editing, effects etc during the 1990s

I was quite surprised the amount of stuff there was needed do do all this,

did it look like this ?   Quantel

[dexters_lab]

Wow! That is a lot of ASICs, FPGAs and CPLDs. I wonder how long it took to design all the custom logic.

I would bet the ASICs only do very generic operations, such as FFT, IFFT, DCT for digital image, or ADC/DAC/serializing/deserializing for analog front ends.
Designing an ASIC just for one purpose (operation/effect/etc.) is not really smart unless they plan to sell millions of them.

many of them date from a much older design and that design dates back to the DPB-7000 which was the original 'Paintbox' (1982) which used lots of boards bristling with 74 logic housed in a 8U rack to do the painting operations, later they shrank those down into custom asics in the late 1980s which became the 2nd generation v-series paintbox in a 3U rack. The Editbox is based on that architecture, there's just more of it so it can do video editing.

pics 5095 & 5094 are the disk and main store, these seem to remain pretty much the same for a good decade.

The DPB-7000 Paintbox is a really interesting piece of hardware, the service manual is  well worth a evenings read

[Rasz]

top of the envelope we are looking at ~1GFlops tops, maybe even ~1000 mips (considering those matrix multipliers), and all of it just to edit SDTV, something a Pentium 200 could do in software just a couple years later

[filssavi]

Wow! That is a lot of ASICs, FPGAs and CPLDs. I wonder how long it took to design all the custom logic.

I would bet the ASICs only do very generic operations, such as FFT, IFFT, DCT for digital image, or ADC/DAC/serializing/deserializing for analog front ends.
Designing an ASIC just for one purpose (operation/effect/etc.) is not really smart unless they plan to sell millions of them.

I don't know about that, that design dates way back to between the late 80 early 90, so the silicon fab landscape was very different, they were still at micron level gate features, so Mask set and all would not have costed as much and do they could have actually spun ASICs for specific reasons (fastidio glue Logic), there is also to note that the system was not cheap, so it is the same with fast oscilloscpes, keysignt certainly isn't selling milions of infinium oscilloscopes (they will sell thousands at best) and still they spin their own ADC's

[mikeselectricstuff]

I wonder if some of the asics are gate arrays where only the top metal is custom, for much lower NRE costs.
 

[SL4P]

These creative systems - and Quantel's servers - did some clever things with arrays of early SCSI disks to get high uncompressed throughput.

The arrays were called 'Dylan' - and used what they called 'chatter' technology - placing different pieces of the video - on different drives - on different controllers / buses - so they could be read & written much faster than a single disk path would allow.

Drawers of SCSI drives - quite impressive in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel

[dexters_lab]

These creative systems - and Quantel's servers - did some clever things with arrays of early SCSI disks to get high uncompressed throughput.

The arrays were called 'Dylan' - and used what they called 'chatter' technology - placing different pieces of the video - on different drives - on different controllers / buses - so they could be read & written much faster than a single disk path would allow.

Drawers of SCSI drives - quite impressive in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel

i could have had one of the Dylan arrays at the same time but decided to leave it, they looked the same size box, but was full of disks so they were rather heavy!

Your comments might align to my theory i mentioned in my video about striping the RGB/YUV over three disks

[SeanB]

I wonder if some of the asics are gate arrays where only the top metal is custom, for much lower NRE costs.

Probably most of them are, as the final mask is a lot cheaper, and you can order a hundred chips at a time, not a full wafer, and they will run them with the next batch. plu7s the chip manufacturer could run say 1000 wafers through all the process bar the top etch, put them in CA storage and only do the final etch as and when they needed a wafer, which was a faster turnaround, plus they could batch low priority orders till a customer was willing to pay priority, or the lot filled a wafer.

Looks like all the common ASICs on the paintbox are the same basic ASIC family, only difference in the position is the final mask, as otherwise they all share common IO paths, power and clock inputs.  Selling the system for $100k plus means you can spend $10k per asic to get away from a rack of TTL with no issue, the rack costs more than the ASIC it goes into, and basically each board there replaces a few shelves in the original design, just fitted into a single card. I doubt there was much extra functionality, other than faster, larger memory and reduced power dissipation, along with extra features that before were options now standard, and no need to send out a rigging crew to install each machine.

[tooki]

In my early days as a computer tech (around 2001), I remember doing some work on some clients' then-outdated AVID Media Composer systems, from around 1993. Those used an early Power Mac 8100 system (which had 3 NuBus slots), added a NuBus expansion chassis (another 3-6 slots I think), and a SCSI RAID array. The Power Mac's slots held the interface to the expansion chassis plus two custom AVID boards, and the expansion chassis was full of AVID boards, too.

In essence, the Power Mac simply drew the user interface and marshalled the AVID cards to do the work amongst themselves; the CPU was orders of magnitude too slow to do what Media Composer did. (Pretty much the only thing done on the CPU was certain effects rendering, and it took foreeeeeeverrrrrr…)

Over the years, AVID systems were able to gradually reduce, and ultimately eliminate, the custom hardware as the CPUs and GPUs became powerful enough to take over — for SD. When uncompressed HD came along, the whole cycle of custom hardware and a gradual shift away started over! (Now any decent computer with a good SSD can manage 4K video, provided you've added the appropriate interface card to get the video in and out of the system.)

It is incredible that we can now shoot and edit 4K video on a phone. It's a testament above all to the progress in GPUs. CPUs would choke trying to do realtime effects at those resolutions.

[Rasz]

Finally watched your Paintbox walkthrough and It immediately clicked Iv seen those menus before, and probably so did every teenager in the nineties in UK There was a demonstration of Paintbox workflow in Bad Influence Episode 1.9 January '93, 8:30-10:00 mark in the video

[dexters_lab]

Thanks, that's really interesting, thanks for posting!

They mention it's a Harry, which is an early version of the Editbox from the 80s, there's a couple of shots showing the three one-arm-bandit style 'reels' used for editing (just like the later Editbox) yet the menus are much more like the classic paintbox and slow to re-draw.

The drawing/painting functionality from the original Paintbox (the DPB-7000) was always featured in the later Quantel products, but they always refer to it like it's a separate thing, but was always just a feature within it.

It does show the investment and how long these products were used in studios once commissioned if that was made in 1996, that suite would have been getting on a bit!

[ms963]

This takes me back.

I used to support and service these machines back in the late 90s. Fast forward a few years and I worked with Paul who is operating the Harry in the video. The Harry was way ahead of its time and had a price tag to match. Harry was once described to me by a senior Quantel engineer as the "son of Henry" - they had to wait for disk and silicon technology to catch up before they could release the product they really wanted to do originally.

Mark.