Quantel Technology
Quantel products deliver unrivalled performance, quality and workflow. That's because they take advantage of purpose-built Quantel technology designed from the ground up to meet the demanding needs of Post and Broadcast. We're proud that our technology has won many awards including 9 of the prestigious technical Emmys. We are even more proud that our customers rely on our unique developments every day right across the film and TV business.
Click on the links below for details of some of the unique technology innovations that put Quantel products in a class apart.
Frame Magic
An apparently simple and totally logical concept, Frame Magic is nonetheless unique to Quantel sQ servers – as behind the simplicity is powerful broadcast technology that eliminates cost and complexity from integrated production systems. Unlike conventional servers, the Quantel sQ server treats every frame in the store as an entity in its own right, rather than as part of a larger file.
At its simplest level, Frame Magic means that when an edit is made between two clips of video, this is held merely as an instruction set in the sQ server to read the selected frames from each clip out of the store in the new edit order. Even if the source clips are deleted, the edit can still be played. Because Frame Magic looks after every frame as an individual, only the unused frames are actually removed from the store. Now imagine a newsroom with say 20 journalists and editors working simultaneously. If each is using different sections of the original source clips and one of these is inappropriately deleted without Frame Magic, 20 stories would be lost. This is a nightmare scenario for broadcasters considering entering the server-based news production arena, which Quantel has totally eliminated.
Additionally, Frame Magic eliminates the cost and complexity of the management layer that would otherwise be required to prevent such accidents happening; furthermore, there is no need with Frame Magic to hold onto unused material as 'accident insurance', which radically reduces the amount of useful storage in the server. Frame Magic is a win-win technology – reducing costs and complexity, increasing performance and security.
Click here to view a Flash presentation on the benefits of this unique technology.
Zone Magic
Zone Magic enables local and remote media sharing and production that is secure, flexible and highly network efficient. Only possible thanks to the unique Frame Magic technology inherent in Quantel systems and their built-in AAF support, Zone Magic introduces a genuine federated workflow that can span a room, a department, a building, a city, a country or the entire world, bringing massive operational and commercial benefits to broadcasters.
At a local level, a single organisation may be servicing the differing needs of several broadcast channels of its own such as news, sports, online, radio etc, and increasingly frequently, third party needs too – for example, as a contracted news supplier to another broadcaster. Some material will be shared, and some ‘private’ to an individual channel. Zone Magic’s federated workflow allows the organisation to simply and securely specify precisely which users have access to shared material on various servers, and which have exclusive access to material that is private to an individual channel.
At a regional or national level, Zone Magic provides a brilliant bridge for a broadcaster with several locations. All regions can browse the contents of the others’ sQ systems and if they desire, edit it remotely to suit their own regional storyline at browse resolution. Only the finished piece is then pulled over the network at broadcast resolution. This also multiplies the available talent pool to effectively include everyone operating a connected system, no matter where they are located.
At a global level, a remote broadcast truck at an international sports event may be editing its own material on its on-board Quantel sQ system but will also want to pull on central resources for archive, interviews etc. Zone Magic allows the remote truck editor to browse, choose and edit material held on the headquarters sQ system in browse resolution and pull in the just the finished piece at full resolution – optimising network efficiency.
ISA
One of the major reasons for the cost and complexity of many server-based news systems is the need to manage the contents of several separate servers simultaneously. Where one or more of these is a browse server looking after journalist desktop editing, the problems multiply further. We believe Quantel's sQ news systems are unique in eliminating these problems, which not only provides more reliable service for the broadcaster under pressure, but also removes a major cost from the system – one of the reasons why sQ for News systems typically have a significantly lower overall cost than competing systems.
The technology that enables this is Quantel's Integrated Server Architecture (ISA). This operates at two levels within the sQ News system. Firstly, the sQ server stores browse material alongside the full resolution video on its internal disks. This is only possible because sQ is a bi-lingual IT (browse) and broadcast (full resolution) server. Browse and full quality material are locked together under a single ISA database. Other systems utilise a parallel database (usually with the browse material held on a separate server from the full quality video) which attempts to track changes in one and relate them to the other. The Quantel ISA approach simply eliminates this potential problem (and cost) at source.
Secondly, when a larger sQ News system is assembled using several sQ servers, ISA continues to treat all the material held as if it were on a single server. Effectively it is – a single database locks them all together. Other systems require separate management for each server, in turn brought together under a larger database – once again adding a high level of complexity and cost which the Quantel ISA approach eliminates at source.
Resolution Co-existence
Resolution Coexistence™ opens up many new workflow possibilities. Material of any resolution, colour space and bit depth can be loaded without the need to re-start or partition the disk. Different material can then be combined in the same project and on the same timeline instantly saving time, disk space and delivering higher quality results. See a demo of this unique technology by
clicking here.
Dynamic Rounding
Dynamic Rounding is a clever technique devised by Quantel for truncating the word length of pixels – a process you can't avoid when you are processing images. Rather than simply losing the lower bits, Dynamic Rounding uses their information to control, via a randomiser, the dither of the LSB of the truncated result. This effectively removes any artefacts that would otherwise be visible. Dynamic rounding is non-cumulative on any number of passes and produces statistically correct results. Dynamic rounding eliminates any truncation artefacts leaving you great looking pictures whatever the bit depth, whatever the processing. Dynamic Rounding is patented technology that you simply can't get anywhere else.
