BBC Newsnight

Looked good, and having two distinct parts of the set works particularly well for Newsnight.



Oops, only just saw this, that was me - only had the information on when it would be on the HD channel, didn't want to mention it until after publication, by which time of course everyone on here would have known anyway. I tend to a bit too nervous about saying anything I shouldn't, so my tweets aren't the best source of information, aside from the very vague, occasional hints of life in Playout 1.

As I have personal experience of. Fonts' default kerning values are sometimes awful (and sometimes non-existant), and you have to do a lot of tweaking to make it visually appealing. Whilst programs like Illustrator do quite a good job at optical kerning, certain fonts that are a little more unusual do require manual kerning.

This is especially important for logos (where they are often scaled to a huge size); it appears that nobody did it on this occasion.
http://sphotos-a.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/404090_10151166922573809_418325067_n.jpg

This is an example of where I had to use manual kerning to make the text flow better. If I left it at default values (or without kerning), the "Film" text would look a mess.

As long as you have an eye for it, manual kerning should be easy-peasy.

Yes it's a fairly standard practise if the service is high profile enough and you still have access to the old facilities.

In reality the new facilities will plow on regardless and do the best they can and the old one won't take over unless everything fails before it goes on air


It normally takes months if not years to get everything working reliably!

Night two, and having reserved judgement for 24 hours, I have to agree with most here that the titles are dreadful, as BBC News titles always are when they're developed in-house.

Strange clip uploaded to the Newsnight website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00zs248.

Also, interesting Newsnight Scotland last night: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01nj0qv/Newsnight_Scotland_15_10_2012/.

For pure curiosity, is that N6 or TC7?

Looked so much fresher then, backdrop and everything!

TC7 I believe - due to the desk.

And the irony is that it was a standard function on even early-80s to 90s Caption Generators like Aston 3, Aston 4, Motif/Ethos etc. It was sometimes called Delta-Spacing, and most decent CG ops would spend some time (if they had the time) to tweak things to look nicer.

Early Cap Gens had to include a manual delta-space/kerning option because they didn't have letter-pair kerning tables in their typefaces - but even when Postscript/Truetype style vector fonts were introduced in the early-90s, manual kerning was still possible (particularly as cheap typefaces often have poor kerning tables)

Newsnight Scotland still using old sting/intro title at 11pm last night (Tues), but with the new astons and graphics on the screens in the studio background.

Hmmm. A tad out of kilter.

Excuse the terrible pun of sorts there.

Newsnight Scotland on Monday was interesting, too. Don't know where it came from, but I'd assume the BBC Scotland building, just not in the studio. They had the branding from the old-old package printed onto boards around the area, but then the new graphics on the screen, and the old titles and closing titles. It's all a bit of a mish-mash

I've just found it on iplayer - and yes it is in the Pacific Quay. It is one of the corridor type areas they often interview people from.

the version of Gill Sans that the BBC use on astons has a particularly annoying kerning fault on the letters a and u. They appear extremely close together in words like 'author' and apparently there's very little that can be done about it (though if Motif has Delta-spacing perhaps I ought to investigate!). You see this appear on any region that uses an Aston - even on the daytime BBC One news summaries!