noggin's posts, page 178

Cliff Richard High Court Case

However arrests in secret are also what happens in dictatorships where people 'disappear'. There are very good reasons to keep things transparently in the public domain.

However in this case Sir Cliff Richard wasn't ever arrested was he?

International News Presentation: Past and Present

One reason may be that a lot of display technologies - like 5x7 and 14-segment LCD/VFD matrix displays - display Roman characters better than they display non-Roman characters like Kanji, Hangul, Arabic, Farsi etc. Some broadcast standards may also dictate Roman ASCII characters being used in channel names etc.?

However I suspect the use of Roman characters pre-date this - so may not be an original cause, but a continued reason.

Even boring things like SPG idents for colour bars may need to be in basic Roman. They also work far more effectively internationally as Roman characters have become a defacto 'standard' I guess?

ITV abandons the South Bank

I expect it will go into TC2 - which is a "set/strike" set-up in the ITV Daytime configuration, unlike TC3 which has two "set-standing" sets.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

The Strictly / Dancing With The Stars staging is pretty recognisable - even if some shows were bought early enough that they have more local control of the set.

TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. TV communication satellites don't move in the sky (*) - they are at a fixed position (that's why Sky dishes don't have to be mechanically tracked). Either the satellite is above the horizon or below the horizon - the time of day is irrelevant. Telstar - the first active communications satellite - DID move around in the sky as it was a low orbiter, but by the mid-to-late 60s we'd got geostationary TV satellites that appear fixed in the sky (They are in an orbit which means they counteract the earth's rotation to an observer on the earth's surface).

What HAS happened in the past is that shows have booked satellite space on 'cheap' satellites that are beginning to wobble (*) a bit, or book satellites that have marginal coverage of the location they are broadcasting from and to. (Satellites have 'footprints' for their various transponders / dishes)

There was a famous occasion 20+ years ago when a VE Day special programme (an early independent - made by Kilroy Television I think) failed to make transmission at all because the signal was too poor to broadcast by the time it reached the UK.

(*) They do move a very small amount - but usually this is less than the beam width of your dish so you don't need to refocus. However AIUI the bigger the dish, the narrower the beam width, and as bigger dishes are often used for broadcasts, you end up having to dynamically track some ageing satellites to counteract the wobble (but these satellites are cheaper to use...)

NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC affiliates and TODAY

You don't see studio cameras white balanced that often in my experience. White balance is far more a PSC thing.

You either see a full line up, or cameras properly colour balanced by eye+scope by a vision operator/supervisor. These days, modern cameras drift so little, I doubt the cameras get touched much at all, unless they pan between sets that need colour balance or exposure tweakss because of inconsistent lighting, flare etc. You may have scene files or similar for different talent (as there may be skin detail differences etc.)

Good Morning Britain

CAR/CCA is effectively virtualised now - with operations at both NBH and Broadcast Centre, as well as Wood Norton (and Glasgow and Salford which I think they also have remote control of?).

I don't know if there is any on-site operation at TV Centre, but there is likely to be some connectivity I'd have thought.

Now CAR/CCA is back in-house (no longer part of Siemens/ATOS) the teams that run MCR1 and MCR2 and CCA/CAR are under common management I believe. (MCR1 is effectively the Radio switching operation at NBH, MCR2 is effectively the SCAR equivalent - and often referred to as SCAR still. Both can do everything, but the rough job split remains. The names refer to the operational areas, not the physical equipment)

Good Morning Britain

TC2 PCR has rotated 90 degrees since the refurb. In the latter days of BBC TVC running it was 'long and thin', now it's 'narrower and deep' I think.



Not sure. This Morning do their own thing in OB provision terms I think, and have no real links to ITN, so would expect those to work directly to BBC CAR/CCA?

Winter Olympics 2018

I'm assured they weren't...

Actually - I now remember that the empty chairs are lit differently - if you look at the hosts' chairs they are similar.

Winter Olympics 2018

They were scrupulously honest and always introduced the guest as being in Stockholm and appearing by technology.

It is a pity the chair colour matching wasn't so effective (they were the same chair but differently lit) (Also the curse of no reflections strikes again)

They did a cracking job at cheating the eye-lines in both studios though.



They also used AR to track the LED wall to the jib so it had parallax. Unfortunately the LED wall is also in the singles, and the mix to the non-AR backdrop (to avoid horrible angle changes on the MCU when the jib repositioned) were really obvious.

Going Underground

Cable only covered a relatively small number of homes until relatively recently. Satellite offered nationwide coverage instantly.

Initially cable was only really deployed in areas with poor off-air signals - rather than as a way of getting extra services.

NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC affiliates and TODAY

Yep - they aren't being flight-cased up and driven hundreds of miles each day or so - nor are they being mounted and un-mounted and put into and out of lens cradles frequently. They have an easy life. If they are on remote PTZ mountings they also don't have ergonomic issues to worry about.



Yep - capital life for most production gear is 5 years (IT-based stuff 3 years these days) so once you've gone past that you're sweating your assets and in 'credit'.