New Meridian, BBC South & South East Thread

Yes saw the South Today linchtime news. The picture went pink & green to start, then the back screens went off, before all the lights & sound went out, though the camera was still running. Quite funny seeing the presenters get up & walk off It then quickly went to the News Channel.

Here's how it happened...

The Afternoon news will transmit from Oxford as some issues are still not resolved fully in Southampton.

Looks like they have the South Today titles in the system just in case.

Ooooh nice breakdown.

Oxford do the afternoon news every Friday for the region while Southampton record their Sunday Politics element. South today titles, Aston's etc are on the system ready to go although this has been the first time it's gone to air because of a failure in Southampton.

Don't Oxford use the old South Today titles though? The ones with the Spinnaker Tower at the end, rather than The Needles lighthouse?

Thanks for the capture - looks like the prompter went down after the green flashes.

Looks like SO is back in business for the six headlines.

I wonder how they managed to get that brief picture back on air when he was taking his mic off. Gallery on a separate circuit or switched to UPS perhaps? Faint lighting in studio was obviously emergency lighting and maybe the camera switched to battery backup it it has it?

How come this is in 4:3? Were they already having problems before this happened?

Even if the camera did have a battery (highly unlikely when rigged as a studio camera on a ped) the CCU [1] in the CAR certainly wouldn't have had (because there's no facility for that). In any case for the output to reach Tx, a whole series of other kit would require power.

My guess is that there was a mains 'brown out', that caused some kit to reboot, and possibly knocked out the studio lighting control, but enough video kit recovered to provide an output. There was Network audio over local pictures at one point, so perhaps the emergency router cut bus was running.

[1] CCU : Camera Control Unit. Rack mounted box that powers the camera, and processes its output.

No, could just be the source I uploaded it from (video server at work which records as WMV files) - not sure if there's a setting in YouTube to switch it to 16:9 and probably if I did try it would look horribly stretched.