REVIEW: Quantel gQ from a Smoke Editors Point of View –
Brian Mulligan (BKM) has very recently had a 'hands on' play with Quantel's gQ. A great insight into the gQ from the point of view of a Smoke Editor...
By Brian Mulligan aka BKM on VFXTalk.com
I had the opportunity to sit in on the Quantel training at my station for the gQ graphics compositor. Now, I am by trade, an editor and not a designer… although by running a Smoke and After Effects box, I have waded into the design pool. With our recent purchase of the gQ, it seems that our designers are now jumping into the editing/compositing deep end.
This review of the gQ 1.5 will be coming form a Smoke editor’s point of view. You might ask what makes an editor capable of reviewing a graphics box? Well there are many similarities between the Smoke and the gQ. It’s not apples and oranges. It’s more like oranges and tangerines. A Smoke is an editor with some paint tools and the gQ is a paint box with some editing tools.
The gQ runs on a Windows 2000 platform and can display both HD and SD images at the push of a button. The gQ is part of the generation Q line of products from Quantel which includes the iQ,(effects/editing/finishing) the eQ,(editing/effects) and the gQ(graphics).
The gQ v1.5 has 5 main areas. Edit, Paintbox, IO, Plug-ins, and Scribe.
There is also a desktop area that is kind of a transparent workspace similar to the HAL clips workspace, but now it is hide able.
Edit The edit module is the place where you can edit video and audio with dissolves and cross fades. It is a single track of video with 8 channels of audio. The system works with cursor to cursor editing. So wherever the cursor is on your timeline, this is your in point, and where the curser is on your source clip is the source in. The out is always the end of clip unless you set in/out marks on your source. This makes quick drag and drop of clips onto the timeline very easy but not very accurate. Trimming clips on the gQ is not an editor’s friend. It will take time to get used to how the system ripples and doesn’t ripple when you drag clips. Trimming the out of a shot with a dissolve would almost always slide the in of the next shot forward, not giving you the option to change the total length of your clip with that trim. Again, no clear ripple on/off. However, all the editing functions are there… including slip and slide.
From Edit you can jump into Paintbox. Paintbox on the gQ is where most of the action happens. Paintbox contains Paint, DVE, Tracking, Color corrections, and Keying.
The connection between the edit timeline and Paintbox is quite nice. Your edit becomes a layer on the 12 layer DVE. You can choose to work with the layer in the DVE as a whole or DVE shots on a shot by shot basis. When you DVE a shot and render it, it will automatically replace itself back into your edit. However, if that shot had dissolves on it, you need to redo the dissolves in your main edit as they get wiped out with this version of software. Also, thinking as an editor, I wanted the box to take my edit of 4 shots all with dissolves and then take it into the DVE and color all the shots blue and add a slight blur. So it would be a nice background piece. This caused the system to crash repeatedly. It seems that 1.5 didn’t like edit with dissolves being used. It got confused after the render when it tried to replace the now flattened clip back into the timeline.
Now, you can simply pull select clips out of the library and place them as layers on the DVE and work with them that way. Each layer accepts mattes for keys, CC, blurs, and DVE xyz manipulations. You can also add Paint graphics to any of these layers with their video. Layer blending only consists of combine and add, along with their inverses. Also, the system is currently only 2.5D, in other words, you have 12 2D layers that you can move in 3D xyz but the layers aren’t all in 3D space, there are no globals or camera controls.
The effects that you render on your DVE comps have what Quantel calls “history”. History lets you go back into your layers and tweak parameters. History was very transparent, and it seemed difficult to work out what clips had histories on them that you can undo. Also, you can at some point in your work erase the history for a clip if you knew that you were never ever going to go back farther and undo it. I never quite got the whole concept but it did seem cool and freighting at the same time. It seemed that you could easily erase or not be able to find the clips that you can alter.
The gQ has editing curves and you are able to save off all or part of the effect to be recalled onto other layers. And the layers are resolution free, so you can add up to a 2K image into a DVE layer. The resolution independence really only applies to the DVE and not Edit. You can’t edit a 2K image next to a 720x486 image on the same edit timeline.
But you can take a 2K image and render a pan and scan as 720x486 and then edit that into you timeline. Just like in AE, your comp size is what gets rendered no matter how big your source material is.
The rest of Paintbox includes tracking and color correction. Nothing earth-shattering here, and the Paint portion of Paintbox is what you would expect from Quantel standards.
I/O is pretty straight forward… machine control, digitize, etc. I only found it odd that as far as importing an image went, it doesn’t currently import Quicktime. And the .avi imports are only 2 standard codecs. Also, mpeg2 is not supported. Running on a standard Windows 2000 platform, I found this all odd. You need to get an expensive plug-in to bridge the gap between Quantel and Windows, if you wanted to load a different .avi codec.
Plug-ins were external to all other modules, similar to the way Sparks works on a Discreet Smoke/Fire. You enter the plug-in with your clips, then render your effect.
Scribe or QScribe is the text module on the gQ. It is a very adequate text tool. You can’t do any text animations other than crawl or rolls. But it does have the nice feature of saving your text clips (video/matte) as a fat key. The video edges are slightly fatter than the key to provide for clean edges when you use them in Paintbox/DVE.
Scribe also uses standard True-type fonts loaded on Windows.
The gQ is a decent box for basic layer compositing, not great, but there are worse.
It excels where Quantel excels, i.e. Paint… and needs some catching up to do in other areas like 3D DVE and Text. I know that v2.0 will be addressing a lot of these issues and should be released by the end of the year.
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