Quantel eQ compared to Flame

[Anonymous]

any comments on this comparison between eQ, Flame and Nitris. I haven’t seen an eQ in action (missed it at NAB, too much to see) but sounds like it is worth a look. I think that all these systems come down to the interface that you are comfortable with although the eQ is about $30,000 cheaper than a new flame on Tezro ($175,00 compared to $200,000) 🙁

http://www.quantel.com/domisphere/infopool.nsf/html/V2Speed

[Anonymous]

Actually Discreet has annouced its flint® visual effects system will soon be available on the Intel®-based IBM® IntelliStation® Z Pro workstation running Linux® for US$99,000

At Standard def it is extremely fast, above SD a Tezro is the way to go (ie FLAME) but for this comparison this isn’t the old lame Flint – Flint on Linux is very very fast.

[Anonymous]

I think that the Quantel comparison for Flint is Qedit Pro or QPaintbox depending on if you are an editor that wants to composite or a compositor that wants to edit. Both are around $68,000 and can do HD so I think either way you look at it price isn’t a good match up for discreet with Quantel. they have to compete on features and that might be a tough sell as well. iQ is the most popular DI tool at post houses, but i think that eQ, gQ, and al the rest of the Q’s haven’t caught on here yet but are mainly big in europe.

at those prices with realtime power, it might not be long before more house here use them. hopefully that will mean better cheaper products for artists if quantel, discreet ,and avid battle it out.

by the way i think that $99,000 for an SD flint system is kinda high given the underlying hardware costs and the fact that everyone will be using HD within 2 years. really hard to make that investment when Media Composer Adrenaline, Qedit Pro, After Effects, Shake, Mirage, gFX, Pirhana, (the list goes on forever) are availabe a lot cheaper with very good toolsets.

we will have to see how well it sells.

[paolo12345678910]

wow if you guys can afford this software, I’d be REALLY interested to know what kind of workstations you own and the specs of it? Any of you guys have an opteron culster for rendering and such? I’m nost sure if people use it for inferno,flame and such but I know they’ve benchmarked 3ds max and its two times faster than a dual xeon 2.6 at rendering. And plus a cluster can easily have 200 gigz plus of ram for under 30k, just wondering. 😯

[Anonymous]

rareelement wrote:

I think that the Quantel comparison for Flint is Qedit Pro or QPaintbox depending on if you are an editor that wants to composite or a compositor that wants to edit. Both are around $68,000 and can do HD so I think either way you look at it price isn’t a good match up for discreet with Quantel.”

A flint /flame runs rings around the Quantel range in terms of compositing.
Perhaps you haven’t seen the Flame lately but with mixed resolution, and a host of improvements – the comparison is vastly stacked against the Quantel. Quantel has slowly lost market share to Discreet in compositing over the last ten years. In my own local market Quantel is now only used in the broadcast market. The visual effects market has all but given up on Quantel for high end compositing.

“by the way i think that $99,000 for an SD flint system is kinda high given the underlying hardware costs and the fact that everyone will be using HD within 2 years. “

Sorry I may have given the wrong impression, Flint is mixed resolution and thus can process HD, it is just a SD i/o box and in terms of performance it is much more competitive at SD data rates – the sgi Tezro has a much better architecture for moving HD frames about.

mike

[Anonymous]

good points. it seems that the “big 3” are each carving out a niche that may overlap every once in a while. you’re right, quantel has not been big in high-end compositing since domino and grew mainly in the european broadcast market. Avid has foothold in offline film and video editing in the US and discreet has the high-end compositing market to its own. what is interesting is that all three see growth coming from taking market share from the others strengths. the advertising of smoke 6 and fire 6 has been double or triple what it used to be along with hands on sessions trying to get mainstream editors to leave avid or FCP. Quantel added action and batch features to its line to gain compostiors and Avid is trying to show that it can compete with the realtime power of discreet and quantel.

I think that eventually the lines between editing and compositing will disappear completely. why have smoke and flame running on the same hardware with 90% of the same features and the same the same for inferno and flame. why not have 3 products based on price and power instead of 5. with the new tools available why have post production at all, when you can work on editing, color grading and compositing on film that has been digitized or captured from HD that day. Make the whole process non-linear instead of the parts of the project. if you don’t want to use the full editing toolkit then turn them off on the desktop and the flame/smoke becomes a flame for a composite artist. kind of like the modular approach that digital fusion uses. if you have it all in there you can turn on what you need when you can afford it by receiving a license that allows more features. i think that would be a great idea, but i digress.

as a filmmaker i am looking in the future to save time and money, hopefully a lot of both.

as long as tool development occurs and the competiiton is strong i’m very happy as an artist.

i will say that everyone has to make up their own minds for there purchases and should not buy a flame over an eQ simply because everybody uses flames in LA for film and the only use gQ in broadcast. you have to be comfortable with the toolset and interface. producers and directors and DP’s will be impressed by power and the ability to make their ideas reality not that you have a onyx 350 in the closet or an iQ for that matter. if you used a hamster on wheel to power your system i wouldn’t care if i could not what i need to without having to wait for renders all day

[eltopo]

I have never believed in those tests in a company’s web-site. Somehow there is always obscure about them. To be honest I have never heard of this product, although it seems to be going backwards in time. It resembles a compositing stations when personal computers were just toys (think early 1990’s) and you didn’t have an sgi by your side.

I honestly wouldn’t consider buying one and here is why:

It is very expensive (175K is a lot of money). It comes from a rather small company that we don’t know if tomorrow is going to be here (crucial thing for support), specially with a very small group of users (just ask anyone with Tremor 😥 )

The technology seems to be going backwards, by making everything more complicated rather than simpler (check out how many things are in that desk!)
It runs on Windows, which we all know what it means.

And even if their tests are 100% accurate and reliable, it doesn’t bring anything new to the table (it is not better than Flame or Shake) and it does bring a lot of question marks.

Shake is now U$3000, and has Apple and its billions behind it. Flame is expensive, but is has a tremendous group base and a long history making it a solid investment, so in the end the iQ seems to lack any solid reason to take a gamble for it.

[Anonymous]

the Quantel product line is well known in many parts of the world but the US is their weakest market. not really going anyware, so not worried about what happened to Silicon Grail or Nothing Real or 5D happening to Quantel because they have plenty of users worldwide, and the iQ is the most popular digital intermediate workstation with performance on par with fire and a large user base.

Quantel is definitely not a toy or a novelty. discreet is great and i am a user and love the products. but i recognize good products when i see them. the debate will go on forever for the best system.

[Anonymous]

Having worked with both Inferno and IQ/EQ (and DS), I must say that the comparison isn’t really saying it all. The EQ is good at what it does but it doesn’t at all have the same abilities as a Flame or DS, no matter how much the folks at Quantel wishes it did. It’s a bit like comparing the speed of making an edit and initiating a playback in Final Cut Pro vs. Shake. The generationQ products aren’t (what I would call) compositing machines. Although they have extensive compositing capabilities, actually I think that the old Henry is a better compositor. The newest version of generationQ is better than the earlier versions, but it’s still not close to the Flame/DS.

The rendering of plugins takes place on the internal pc processors (which they refer to as the host processors) and does not take advantage of the hardware, except for some basic operations such as reading and writing to disk etc. The good thing is ofcourse that as pc processors become faster and faster so will your machine, BUT the pc processors on earlier systems were annoyingly out of date (Dual 800Mhz) AND you have to wait until Quantel releases new hardware for the new processors, which has meant a lot of waiting.

Also their bashing of realtime preview is quite ridicolous.

Enough b*tching, the generationQ products are very good (if not the best) at many things. For example realtime HD to SD (or 2K to SD in the IQ)conversion and even uprezing that looks good is wonderful in the world of digital intermediate.

But they’re not the best at compositing.

Just my $2.50

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