An LWT ident made by Electronic Arts

^^ Far better, though the whole thing looks rather dated and a world away from the 1986-89 era, which is probably my favourite LWT era, followed by the 1996-99.

I too am curious about what they used to make idents during this period. It was a transitional time, going from slides and basic electronic generated idents to more modern computer graphics. I'l love to know what kit Central were using in particular when the cake first came along.

It is likely to have been software running on reasonably general purpose computers usually (Vaxes etc.) I think. There were some 3D systems beginning to appear in the 80s, like Cubicomp (think that was a bit later), and graphics workstations like the SGI range appeared quite a lot later. In the early 80s I think Bosch Fougerolle (sp?) was a pretty popular system as well?

Paintbox was much more of a 2D system - it had no internal 3D processing - so you had to do all of your 3D stuff by eye if you used it. You could tie it to early disk recorders like the Abekas stuff - and it could do small scale animation using it's cel animation option. This allowed you to have one of its two frame-stores as a background. You then divided the other frame up into smaller frames which it would then tie to the end of your pen and allow you to cycle through. So if you wanted a 1/9th screen area animation, you could have 9 frames - as you could divide one frame store into 9 x 1/9th screen area cels. If you wanted 16 frames of animation it could be 1/16th screen area and so on.


It was just beginning to appear possibly - but you could use it for simulated 3D graphics by simply feeding a still image with colour in the right places to map into a 3D model created in the Mirage. So if you had a Paintbox feeding a mirage, you could make some quite complicated 3D objects that could be manipulated in true 3D. There were even light source options (Starlight I think it was called) that let you have virtual lighting effects on your Mirage objects.

You could have created the LWT logo as a solid object in Mirage and Paintbox probably.

Cypher - which was Quantel's CG was effectively 1/4 of a Mirage ISTR. This allowed for complex 3D animation of text (mainly flat 2D stuff I think - but I think if you had enough processing you could do 3D blocks)


Sadly many of them probably no longer exist. They were incredibly power hungry - and quite delicate.

For info :

Paintbox (until the last generations) was a 2D, mainly single-frame/dual-frame device. Basically Photoshop.
Originally Harry was just a 50" uncompressed digital disc recorder (in fact it might have been less than 50" originally).
Encore was a Flat 2D DVE (i.e. the picture remained a flat sheet, but could be manipulated in 3D space. Questech's original non-CLEO Charisma was pretty similar - and a lot cheaper)

The Harry Suite (which was what everyone called Harry) was effectively a Harry 50" disc store, a Paintbox, an Encore DVE and some clever processing that allowed you to do chroma/luma/difference keying, matrix operations on video (to add fake newsprint, film grain etc.) and let you do lots of multilayering. You could "Buy" and "Sell" individual frames into and out of Paintbox, which allowed you to do frame-by-frame re-touching, rotoscoping, wire-removal etc. All of this in uncompressed D1 720x576/720x486 resolution. Revolutionary isn't the word! Encore could be cleverly controlled by tablet to do all sorts of sophisticated transitions that would have been really difficult to do with a manual DVE. There was, I think, an option to use Mirage with Harry as well.

Harriet was a second-generation (V-series) Paintbox interfaced with a short (12.5"?) RAM store, that allowed for short sequences to be created.

Henry was a major upgrade to Harry that allowed far more sophisticate multi-layering (including the ability to undo layers, and it added very early RAID-style storage (which allowed 3 x 270Mbs streams to be played and recorded simultaneously)

HAL was a second-generation (V-series) Paintbox interfaced with a disc storage device from Henry (but without the DVE and keying stuff) that allowed long sequences to be created.

Editbox was Henry but more optimised for editing rather than effects.

None of the Quantel devices were 3D creation boxes, though you could fake a lot of stuff if you had a good idea and a good knowledge of the systems.

Thanks noggin - a very interesting post, as always.

I'm guessing the likes of the Vaxes must have had some sort of custom hardware to get a broadcast-format output?

It must have been a very exciting time for video processing - a lot happened in a short space of time really when you think it was only the late 70s when the first DVEs came out, and just a few years later the Mirage will have blown people away!

Though it's interesting that it look quite a bit longer for digital editing to become the norm. I guess this was primarily due to cost of storage (RAM and disk).

Everything is of course so much more sophisticated now, but where's the creativity?! I bet there's a plugin for everything that you would ever want to do! No longer does one have to create 3D shapes by writing some Pascal...

Yes.

There were output devices for recording to film and video. Film was relatively easy - with a number of different systems (which were also related to devices used for creating things like slides, overhead transparencies etc.) - video was a bit trickier.

The BBC weather graphics system introduced, I think, in 1985 used Mac XLs (close relation to the Apple Lisa) to drive a Vax, which itself then drove a modified "Soft Paintbox" (which was a Quantel Paintbox that interfaced to the Vaxes). Something similar was used by News to create sport news graphics ISTR.

Animation either needed a disc recorder (there were analogue models as well as the early BBC digital development device - used for the titles of Life and Loves of a She Devil amongst others) or a 1" VT machine that could reliably do single frame recording (at least one Sony model could)


Yep - 1976 was when the first real DVE appeared (a modified synchroniser made by Quantel that did a static shrink) - and quickly you got resizers, rotation etc. Ampex developed ADO (Ampex Digital Optics) and Quantel developed Mirage all in less than 10 years.



Digital editing needed a digital VTR to appear to be really viable (The D1 started to appear around 1986/7 and that started to shake things up). Once you had a D1 and a Harry - you had a system that allowed you massively more multi-generation edits than was the case with 1" or 2", and a degree of non-linear editing. Once Henry arrived, you were able to do much more.

It took digital compression and storage development to make long-form editing digitally, and non-linearly, a reality. I still remember watching my first online non-linear edit on Heavyworks in 1995 - though this was after Editbox and Henry had appeared, the Heavyworks UI was far more geared up to mainstream rather than effects editing.



Or explodes by mistake - when you pointed the DVE at an unformatted bit of disk...

Just to add to Noggin's post.

There was a 3rd party manufacturer who supplied an outboard animation package for the V series Paintbox. It was connected via the Paintbox's IO ports. I can't for the the life of me remember the manufacturers name after all these years. It had it's own internal disk pack and processor - I want to say 'Matrox' but I'm not sure. The operator just saw additional menus on his HUD and it was very easy to use. Definitely a 'no go' area if it went wrong, unlike the Paintbox itself which was quite easy to work on (and we had spares of every board and PSU held on site, and remote 'dial in' facilities between all the Quantel kit and Quantel HQ wherever it happened to be around the World at any time night or day). GMTV had one of these external boxes connected to their V series. GMTV also had a HAL, although maybe I should say two HAL's because the first one went back after just a few weeks as being totally unreliable. I wonder who got that one in the end!

As Noggin says, Harriet was just a Paintbox with a solid state RAM pack added to it - I too can't remember the capacity after all these years - but not very much. LNN had one, and bemoaned the fact they couldn't really do much with it due to the limited capacity. Carlton had a HAL and Paintbox.

LWT had numerous Paintboxes and HAL's. They also had the first DVE I ever worked on, the Quantel DPE 5001. What a lovely beast an surprisingly reliable. IC's with the type numbers filed off! Hand tweeking of variable capacitors which were really just bits of twisted wires that you fiddled with for 'minimum smoke' on the vectorscope display etc. Two channels too, and all controlled by a mini-computer. If memory serves me right I think it was a PDP8 (?) - a few horizontal boards in a 4/5U box. What I loved about it was that if you reduced the picture to a small box and turned on the border control you got a border outside the active picture area - a lovely touch, and with round corners too if you wanted it. Often seen on the early series of 'Blind date'. Never saw that on any other DVE - all the later ones seemed to put the border inside the active picture area, including the Quantel Encore that Noggin mentioned. LWT had 3 channels of Encore, if you watch the later series of 'Blind Date' you'll see the DVE boxes have square corners (boo!). LWT also had Charisma but we did not think it was as advanced as the Quantel kit and it was only used in the edit suites. Abekas equivalents too, but again never used live on-air apart from GMTV who had nothing else. Naturally a Cypher in Graphics.

Mirage. Well we didn't have one of those! When we needed to use it live for C4's Friday Night live (or was that Saturday Night Live) we sent two live video channels over to one of the facility houses who fed back the combined video effect and associated key channel. It was all so much more interesting back then.

Edit: I still have the brochures for the DPE5001 and it says the minicomputer was an LSI-11, which I believe is based on the DEC PDP11 (pre-Vax - just, maybe?)

Did I mention we had a Quantel DSC4000 + silk standards converter. Ex- Montreal Olympics I believe, lovely jubbly for it's era.

IIRC ... there was a 1985 pilot of Saturday Live, a series in 1986 and in 1987, then a series of Friday Night Live in 1988.
I seem to recall that the 1985 Saturday Live pilot originally went out on ITV rather than Channel 4.

ISTR that the camera guys hated Mirage transitions - as they didn't get red lights back from Covent Garden (or was it Soho) where the Mirage was based!

Yep.

ISTR that at a BAFTA awards in the early-80s the BBC wanted to do a 4-way (I think) DVE effect for the nominee live-shots. Which needed a multi-channel 5001. But they were scared to death to rig it in an OB truck. So the (story goes that) they had 4 vision circuits out, and one back, just to do the DVE, with the DVE at TVC (or possibly Lime Grove?) A bit like the days when OBs had reverse visions into them carrying Telecine inserts.

It's all got a LOT easier. And a bit boring. (Though not always!)


The Silk was amazing for its time.

Not sure I should say this, but there was a successor to Encore that never saw the light of day. It was effectively a cut-down Mirage re-engineered (Cypher was effectively 1/4 of a Mirage ISTR) but the bottom fell out of the DVE market with Charisma and Cleo so Quantel bowed out of DVEs. (And Questech went bust a few years later...)

Of course you're right about the lack of on-air cues for the remote Mirage stuff. It was being used in conjunction with a GVG300 mixer which, whilst it had a perfectly ok tally system, wasn't clever enough to be able to expand the tallies from aux bus sources as well (for the cams obviously). The 300's were eventually replaced with GVG4000's and even though it had a much more comprehensive tally system even those mixers were surrounded by tally pin matrices to allow maximum flexibility. Can't remember whether it was Covent Garden or Soho after all these years, of course it was all very carefully scripted so the camera operators were able to deal with the Mirage transitions and it wasn't used that much to be honest.

I wasn't surprised that Encore was the last Quantel DVE product, which I thought was a great shame as I really liked their kit. Very well designed, implemented and above all SUPPORTED in a professional manner. We always held Quantel and GVG up as examples of two leading light companies that understood the needs of engineering staff and timescales etc. Somehow, after GVG sold out (the first time) the support side went completely downhill and in my view they have never really recovered. I had more than one heated discussion with GVG at 5pm on a Friday asking for support only to be told that the person with the key to the spares room had finished for the day and could it wait until Monday! Other conversations on an evening night with the American side of the operation who tried their best at a considerable distance. I would never buy anything from GVG now, nothing. Quantel remain as good as ever and it was no bother for example for them to send a support engineer out late at night to look at a Studio Clipbox (another incredibly reliable bit of Quantel kit). Do miss the 300's though - had my training course when the UK operation was based in a back street in WInchester. I 'designed' some bespoke matrix wipes for it using a BBC micro and eprom blower - often seen on LWT's 6'OClock show, couldn't do that now with todays modern mixers. Had my next GVG training course |(the GVG200CV) in ... Grass Valley, what a place!!

Edit: Not to forget Abekas of course. Some nice kit, but all designed to end in tears once Carlton bought Quantel and Abekas, what were they thinking of.

All very interesting stuff, thanks guys.

Which is the most likely way in which the LWT idents will have been created? Each frame rendered individually (taking quite some time no doubt!) then captured to film? The idea of an analogue disk store is interesting!

There are odd bits of kit on eBay, not sure how old they are though. A Charisma X-ten and an Abekas unit. Am managing to resist the temptation to buy more useless junk though - I still have an ancient cue dot generator from a previous eBay whim! I plugged it in once...

Ok, I'll ask as no-one else has. Why did you buy yourself a cue dot generator?

I believe they had some incredibly talented R&D staff in the early 90s.

I wish I could give you a good answer. I thought it would be fun and it was only 99p. Unfortunately the thing is so damn big the postage was £15! Actually I don't think I could even use it now - it has an XLR-style mains socket on it and I gave the only suitable lead I had away with another piece of useless junk (a very old triple-stack cart machine).