Quantel held a presentation today on their generationQ product line at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel.
The presentation was headed by Steve Owen of Quantel who started with headlines from around the industry. Such as: Ad Slump!, recent aquisitions (Thomson buying Grass Valley), an article about Smoke and Mirrors adding a lower price suite signaling the end of Flame suites (the first of a few pointed and veiled jabs at Discreet). The point though was that with all the changes in the business in the last few years we need solutions that add new services and ones that add efficiency in commodity areas. And of course, that Quantel has those solutions (!).
He revealed that Quantel is committed to Post… it makes up 65% of their business (didn’t you always wonder?). Their strategy is to provide: performance, scalability and support open standards. During talk about this strategy it was clear that they are gunning for Discreet’s market with references to mixed resolutions only being available on their system and speed being “10 times faster”.
They showed a demo editing with mixed resolutions material (2k, HD, SD) with re-rez happening on the fly. They showed the edit in High Definition then switched to Standard Definition. The edit played back nicely although I spotted that the material in the dissolve that had been done in HD was not re-rezzed properly when played in SD, so at the dissolve point it jumped in size. I would guess a quick re-render would fix this but was surprised this got by in a demo.
Scalability was the next topic and this was truly a smart demo. They showed how they make three products: iQ, eQ and QEffects – all share the same software toolset and metadata – the difference being platform and cost. iQ is the performance system running on a much larger box and designed for speed. An impressive speed demo using 2k material was shown. eQ is the mid priced system they said was designed to handle up to HD. QEffects is a standard PC, running software only. Same software, user interface and metadata across all three systems (excellent for training, support and compatability). Cost wise they showed a chart with QEffects in the $10k area, eQ in the $150k and iQ in the $300k range.
The flyer they handed out broke it down like this:
iQ – high end post production
eQ – mainstream online effects editing
QEffects – multi-layer compositing
They talked about plug-ins, mentioning that they had many of their own and many third party (although I didn’t hear any of the primary Discreet spark vendors mentioned). They did demo one developed with ITK to take 2k frames and put them on HD videotape using two HD frames for each 2k… and then supposedly reforming the 2k from that. Also showed Primatte as a show of the speed it could operate on their hardware.
Big push in support of Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) – calling it “The EDL for the 21st Century”. They say they support it now and showed a conform on IQ in HD using AAF. One great thing to see was they then added a video layer and pulled in a 320×240 rough cut to compare the assembly to. Instant uprez of the small movie and then allowing a split screen to check sync. Then they decided to add a title and to show the compatability they bounced over to QEffects to do the title work, saving the setup, and finishing and tweaking the title back on the IQ. Slick and easy demo, although I was dismayed to see the finished title render ended up in a clip bin and had to be dragged back to the timeline… I had to leave but recall seeing a similar workflow at NAB… this seemed odd as most systems are striving toward working in context in a timeline.
The demo was very well done, time well spent. It focused on speed, flexibility and if I had one complaint it would be that there was no real exploration of any of the tools (for example a keyer, tracker, color correction), but as I said I had to leave early. Being very intimate with Discreet tools like the Modular Keyer and Color Warper I have much higher expectations from such tools and don’t take for granted a given manufacturer can deliver that kind of power. If you are familiar with the tools on the Q boxes, please add your comments to this article.
Jeff