Richard Wright (1999), 'Programming with a Paintbrush: The Last Interactive Workstation', http://www.runme.org/project/+Painting/ (also in Filmworks, no.12, Autumn 2000)

[add to Bowles notes on specialist training]

In relation to the necessary high level skills involved in post production using the Quantel computer graphics system, Richard Wright describes the particularities of its production culture, its working methods, commercial and aesthetic values (1999). He is interested in the ways a system like Quantel presents itself as specialist with a particular aesthetic, when essentially it offers the same technical specification as much lower end desktop software systems - and approximately one hundred times more expensive. The mystique and the high price are maintained by a series of systematic marketing and design strategies that maintain the 'inevitable inaccessibility of the machine itself is paradoxically combined with an extremely high visibility of its end product' as well as 'the simulation of creative control' (1999). He is not simply saying there is no difference but pointing to the working methods that arise between a hardware system like Quantel and a software one like After Effects. 

The technical differences are of little consequence but different working methods contribute to a 'completely different artistic practice as well as defining how well they integrate into each level of commercial production practices'.  Hence specialisation is maintained at both a technical and aesthetic level. Added to this, it is a complex operation so relations of production are somewhat different too in reinforcing a series of separations between technical operation and artistic prowess and traditional values around originality and authorship. Wright likens this to the traditions values of painting, and says that 'the user themselves who must supply the organisation - the data structure is not in the computer but in the user's head.' (1999) More importantly, for Wright is the imnfluence on the production culture as a whole: 
'By a careful analysis of a graphics system it is quite to possible to see how a manufacturers particular technological development can have an impact on moving image culture, both through particular aesthetic biases and through its relation to the values of the commercial environment it has been designed for - its production culture. [...] Technologies are now composed of both machines and people which work together in quite specific and complex ways.' (1999)