RyanE's posts

This has been a great discussion and I’ve enjoyed contributing. Please join us on TV Live Forum to continue the conversation if you would like to.

The world Odetics I think had been used somewhere else (news possibly?) but I may be wrong on that. The NTA was commissioned in the early 1990s but took a very long time to get to air. There was a lot riding on the project and in house-written software that was the heart of the area and should have been a combined planning, scheduling, database and transmission automation was simply too tall an order for the time. In the end, the control element of this software was ditched and a commercially available automation system was bought to make it all actually work.

By the time the NTA got to air the old manual control galleries were very tired and the working practices out of date. But even in 1995/6 there was no real prospect of multiple digital channels, red button, interactive and multi stream tx. The NTA lived on into the year 2000 and provided 4:3 programme playout and separate analogue schedules in peak hours.

And never mind the NTA being short lived - the DTA only lasted until 2005 or thereabouts when they moved playout into a whole new building.

Whilst Play out , obviously, was an important part of a TV station
it really was much the same in the 1950s as it was at the start of the 1990s.....

But then was was the first growth in Multiple channels
and the technology whether its be cart machines the first stills stores and Charecter generators
which started the change in the early 1990s not forgetting computerised scheduling
and then automation (and then linking the two which was why the NTA was late!)
But the pace of change speeded up with Servers and multiple channels
and the video and audio format being Digital - Rec601 and AES3
and the Mixer being just about a card in a PC..... (channel in a box)
and what the people at home got was a compressed version of that!

Unlike in PAL days where what came out of the back of the camera or Microphone was more or less
the same thing as went on the screen at home . almost unprocessed.

So the NTA was a step which soon was overateken -
and the DTA was being overtaken by Servers which loaded
same progresm in the Nations as well - so That Programmes were not off tape
(A bit like in the 70s Telecine masterial was transfered to tape)
SO the move up "the road" was needed for technical operational reasons well as commercial.
and then AS11 DPP came in in 2014 so tape delivery died!
So a lot in those 20 years or so

And now Red Bee spins up extra channels for Chanel 4 in the cloud!
No "on Prem" hardware at all!

And as you can now Code And Mux in the cloud does this mean that play out becomes
ST2110/St2022-6/BT709 live in plus Recorded as AS11DPP or simlar (IMF is better!) file package
and a complete mutiprogramme MPEG TS or IP stream out...

There were two reasons why the NTA wasn't suitable, one was that it was built for two channels: BBC1 and BBC2 and the digital offering was 4 channels plus interactive etc. It wasn't possible to add the extra suites, it was too small. Secondly as you say it would have required upgrading everything, not only for widescreen but also the DTA was totally component digital. There was the other reason that they wanted to 'dual message' with different junctions on analogue and digital versions - so on BBC1 analogue there would be trails about getting digital TV, while on the digital version there'd be a trail for a programme on BBC Choice.

The DTA was originally fairly basic and not as much resilience as the NTA, in fact the first broadcasts of BBC Choice I think came from a temporary suite on the floor above. Eventually in late 1999 the DTA became the primary TX area, on air 24 hours a day and it was upgraded to add all the things that analogue TV had that digital didn’t and make it more resilient

They were from suites on the floor below, in amongst the UKTV channels (although World and Prime were there first) Deejay will be able to go into more details, but I remember always being amazed by how basic and manual their suites were.

Incidently the other TV company I know who had MARCs were Thames, although not till about 1990 so they didn't have much of a life either. However after they stopped being used for ITV they went to Teddington and were used for (amongst other channels) BBC World's European adverts, of which there were few (originally BBC World at the BBC didn't handle any adverts)

The BBC World, Prime (and old Arabic service) were three fairly similar suites built around analogue PAL infrastructure I think and were all based on Betacam SP format. There was one Odetics tape jukebox which was originally assigned to Prime but was reallocated to World. (There was a door from the Prime Suite into the odetics room right up until the area closed in 2004, but the world director had to go out into the corridor and around the corner!). This was because Prime originally was a very complex channel to direct, with a schedule that jumped in and out of BBC One to BBC Two and filling between programmes it didn’t have the rights to. The prime suite had four Outside Source lines too right up to the end (world only had two, plus a dedicated news circuit).
All programme tapes were loaded manually and on Prime you could only have two trails per junction when it lost the odetics to World. Happy days.

The NTA MARC machines were in use from around 1996 until probably only 2000. Originally they were procured to provide all channel playout for BBC 1 and 2 but in the end were used solely for trails. This was not because they were particularly unreliable in themselves but because they were integrated into a separate automation system, and the two occasionally fought with each other!

Yes, although it’s a different button to Take Next 😉

Here's a little video made by BBC Output Operations which some might find interesting:

How do our stories from across the world get to your tv and radio? ⁦@joeleates⁩ - our fantastic ⁦@OpsBbc⁩ Studio Director shows you how. Great watch 👇 pic.twitter.com/UeVUI1CtuL

— BBCOutputOps (@OpsBbc) March 22, 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZT1b5lt0qM
Thought this might fit in here. Is it acurate?

Robotic cart machines could be extremely reliable, if maintained well and looked after properly. But you needed excellent operators to ensure if they did run into problems you could get the tapes out and play them in standalone machines. You also needed to leave enough time for them to cue up! However many channel playout companies and news operations used machines like MARC, Betacart, Odetics and Flexicart successfully.

This wasn’t possible with the very earliest 2” machines though, because the tape cartridges were not playable in any other machines.

And like with all machines, when you combine mechanics with electronics you are always going to run into problems every so often.

For news tape inky really came in with cassettes so you just did an A-B roll between two machines
Going through the stack of cassettes , and grabbing the right one when the running Order changed

Or taking the one haded to you are getting it in air fast !

One “leading world class broadcaster ” (nit European)
Went to an automated cart machine to do thus ...
But it meant that the latest news took about 3 mins to get in air
by the time you ha stopped the cart Robot , stuffed the cassette in and then restarted it
And it read the bar code etc etc etc...
Total waste of money ..

Your first paragraph is a reasonable assumption. It would be unusual for a show to have more than one machine playing in ‘inserts’ unless it was particularly complex. Whilst I never worked on it, a show like TIYL would be quite simple from a production standpoint and I very much doubt there would be more than one studio ‘play in’ machine. The placing of the inserts would be such that the VT operator could easily spool and cue between Eamon’s scripted links and would not really be a production problem, especially with the introduction of timecode which allowed the operator to just load up a list of ‘in’ points and get the machine to cue to those as required.

Yes, in the days of analogue dubbing copies of tapes would reduce the quality, so the less the better (obviously). After 3 or 4 dubs you could be on rocky ground.

Scanner = slide scanner

Quantel - yes this refers to an off-board DVE (digital video effects) unit as most vision mixers didn’t have these effects built in to them until relatively recently. Usually DVEs are fed from the vision mixer via aux outputs and come back into the vision mixer on a separate source input. Sometimes on archive recordings of news and things like Top of the Pops, you can see the cut from a direct source to one routed via a DVE because the edge of the picture jumps in slightly (due to differences in the over scan). So the person operating the vision mixer can take sources directly, or if a DVE effect is required cue up the effect on the quantel, cut to the quantel on the vision mixer, animate on the call of the director then cut or mix away from the quantel to the next source clean before calling up the next DVE required. Working with off board DVEs like this continued well into the 2000s (I certainly remember using an Abekas DVE like this in Bristol in 2003).

For graphics, there are various ways these can get to air. Viz can be set up to have several pause points in a sequence, so the director has to animate it when the presenter reaches the appropriate point in the script, or it can be an auto mixing sequence that changes every few seconds. Sometimes though they record a viz render onto the server and cut it into separate clips. This can be safer for some programmes and it can allow for more flexibility.