Quantel is a technology company based in Newbury (England) that describes itself as:

Quantel develops innovative, world-leading content creation systems for broadcast, post and DI. We are driven by a passion to create the most powerful and efficient tools for the digital age. Quantel technology means business; our systems combine industry-leading performance with total scalability to enable productive workflows for post production, graphics, digital intermediate and news/sports production.

The main product for the Broadcasting division is the Broadcasting Server system which consists of sQ Editors (glossy front end editing station), ISA Managers (the brains) and sQ Servers (storage).

One of Quantel's unique selling points is that the storage system is highly efficient; no 2 frames are stored twice in their patented technology called FrameMagic. A huge advantage of this is when you are versioning, that is producing a version of the film for the UK market and then another version for the Japanese market. All the pictures for both versions of the film are only held once. The bits of film that are unique are held separately and are seamlessly stitched together to produce 2 versions. So the same film versioned for 10 countries' laws will only occupy the same storage space of one and a little bit's worth of storage space. This is unlike most of the competitor systems where it will occupy 10 times the space. The advantages don't stop there! If you want to copy the 10 versions from the edit server to the playout or archive server then The Quantel System manages the copy ensuring that no to frames are copied twice, so copying the 10 versions will be 10 times quicker than an equivalent file based storage system. Cool!

One can use the Quantel Server system to record video, copy it between servers, create new clips from recorded rushes, search for media, add tagging information to rushes (which follow the media around, in and out of edits) and all sorts of other video and audio related functions. Quantel exposes it's Application Programmer Interface (API) so that anyone can control the Quantel server system. This interface is used by lots of automaters to schedule records, making back ups, housekeeping, etc. The API is written using CORBA which is basically a convenient way of passing objects around a network, it's similar to RMI (Java only) or COM (Windows only).

This article will join together a series of articles on how to get the most from the Quantel IDL to control the worlds most powerful video editing system.

If you can't wait and you want to get started straight away then I'm available for consultancy, just drop me a line. No application too small, no language too difficult^*.

Set up and using a test system

1. Installing a Quantel ISA Manager with DummyServers for test development
2. Simple instructions for recording a clip using Quantel Dummy Server

Development

1. Compiling the Quantel’s quentin.idl
2. Obtaining the CORBA IOR and connecting to the ZonePortal
3. Coming Soon: Searching for clips in a zone using CORBA, updating their properties and deleting them.
4. Coming Soon: Registering a CORBA listener and receiving clip and server event notifications.
5. Coming Soon: Cutting a clip in half, reversing the parts and joining them back together as a new clip.
6. Coming Soon: Recording a new clip.

* provided there is an IDL compiler available for that language.