But if it's a stylstic choice (like TWD on 16mm in the states) then surely it'd be acceptable? Or are you expected to add grain in post?
Neither. If you are broadcasting on a tightly bandwidth constrained platform (like DTT or DSat) that grain won't survive effectively (or will hammer other aspects of the image) you should be avoiding it and making other stylistic choices. If you're shooting for Blu-ray or cinema you can make different choices.
It's not the source of the grain that's the issue, it's the presence of it at all...
The transmitter was completed in 1992, after the collapse of Communism.
This is what it looks like nowadays:
Source: Thomas Ledl, Wikipedia
That tower reminds me more of the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Ostankino and the TV Tower in Berlin, in terms of the design.
Also it seems odd that TV Nova reuse the title of the Communist-era newscast a decade later.
The Alexanderplatz TV tower is a much more pleasing design though. As is the TV Tower in Tallinn (which was built for microwave relay of the 1980 Olympic Sailing events I believe - as they took place in coastal Tallinn in Estonia, not landlocked Moscow!)
Both have great views and are good places for a coffee and a cake.
Kaknastornet in Stockholm is also good for a view (and also for coffee and a cake!) - but is a microwave relay station only I think - no main TV transmitters on it.
Don’t they also say 16mm film isn’t good enough for HD?
The BBC still do - but I believe will grant occasional exceptions if you use the right film stocks... The issue with 16mm is that it can have high levels of grain, which is like video noise. This absolutely hammers H264 encoders - reducing the overall picture quality on the final encode in the chain for viewers at home, increasing blockiness, softness and motion artefacts (as data is wasted encoding random grain rather than real picture)
For similar reasons HD video cameras are only allowed a maximum of 3dB of gain in to keep them as noise-free as possible. (That's also in the specs - or certainly was)
HD Cam was the original BBC HD delivery format for a number of years - until it was replaced by HD Cam SR. It continued to be used as an intermediate format for a long time after this though - and I've seen it used in the last 2 years or so on HD productions ...
(Have a look at how many PasBs in the archive from some productions are not on SR...)
HDV on the other hand was so lousy - it used DV25 data rates to carry HD instead of SD content - both in picture quality and error correction terms (tiny bit of drop out could nuke an entire GOP - not just a single frame) it was a terrible choice for origination anyway.
I worked for a rival broadcaster/producer at the time who was all HD and I remember there was some hope that we might be able to sell some of our stuff to the BBC. Then the head of operations read the delivery requirements and they were so much higher than ours we had no chance
Ah - the BBC rules were (and are) pretty much identical to Sky and Discovery - not sure about ITV and C4.
Acquisition and edit codec rules are pretty much the same (the 50/100 Mbs is near-universal outside of News), as is/was the requirement for appropriate Tier-approved cameras. (Though the latter is tricky as more and more unapproved cameras are being used day-to-day)
I wonder how much those flatscreen 16:9 screens cost in 1997! Must have been a few thousand, this was the time where a 16:9 CRT would have cost a couple of grand, let alone a flat one!
They were early Fujitsu plasma screens. 800x480 or thereabouts resolution - but they did run at 50Hz thankfully.
The gallery was mainly 4:3 CRTs scan-crushed to letterbox (broadcast 16:9 CRT monitors small enough for mixer stacks didn't really exist then) - with Sony 24" or 28" domestic 16:9 CRT TVs as mixer out and preview. The 16:9 TVs were 50Hz and <£1500 at that point I'm sure - as you'd never have bought 100Hz models for broadcast use. From memory there were no 16:9 broadcast monitors in the gallery - even in lighting it was a 4:3 CRT scan crushed.
The floor monitors were a very useful 16:9 CRT Sony TV designed partially for the Playstation 1. When they stopped making that studios wept - as it was the only nice, low-cost, 16:9 native monitor you could easily source for a sensible price. Everyone had to revert to 4:3 cheap broadcast monitors that scan-crushed (but were bigger than they needed to be)
Incidently the standards for BBC programmes can be quite high. For example when they started HD a programme could only be considered HD if there was a certain % of HD native material. And what constituted HD material was quite strict, footage from HDV wasn't for example, nor was HDCAM, as only HDCAM SR recorded to a high enough quality.
HD Cam was the original BBC HD delivery format for a number of years - until it was replaced by HD Cam SR. It continued to be used as an intermediate format for a long time after this though - and I've seen it used in the last 2 years or so on HD productions ...
(Have a look at how many PasBs in the archive from some productions are not on SR...)
HDV on the other hand was so lousy - it used DV25 data rates to carry HD instead of SD content - both in picture quality and error correction terms (tiny bit of drop out could nuke an entire GOP - not just a single frame) it was a terrible choice for origination anyway.
BBC 50/100 rule is still largely in play (There were rumblings about AVC acquisition dropping to 25 as it holds up well - but I don't think it happened)
Current delivery standard - like many places - is based around AVCi 100Mbs in an MXF wrapper, with DPP AS11 metadata.
From January all content will need to be delivered to the archive in this content - even Programme-As-Broadcast recordings of live shows - as tape is no longer going to be accepted. Quite a few live shows are now having to set up AVCi 100 recording solutions that are drop-in replacements for HD Cam SR decks - so that they can walk away from a studio or OB with a DPP Compliant file (with Time of Day not 10:00:00:00 start timecode)
I cannot find the post but is there any reason why a clip from BBC Redux cannot be played out on air?
No - and it happens all the time. BBC Redux highest quality off-air recording is a lossless off-air MPEG2 transport stream containing the MPEG2 or H264 video and MP2 or AC3 audio. DSat is used primarily, not DTT ISTR - hence no AAC audio.
Archive-heavy shows will often use Redux clips as edit place-holders (so they only order up the archive for the content they end up using and reduce digitisation requirements if it's on tape).
For fast turnaround shows where content isn't on the new Digital Archive - then Redux is also 'just about good enough' (particularly) in HD - to get away with for a short clip. (Though BBC One HD and BBC HD both had DOGs which makes such re-use obvious...)
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Is it just because its not high quality enough bit rate wise (doesn't news require a minimum of 35 Mb/s)?
That - and burned in DOGs on lots of content.
News don't have official bitrates of their own AFAIK - and routinely feed content at a LOT lower bitrate than 35Mb/s.
Mainstream BBC HD rules are still - like most broadcasters - 50Mb/s LONG GOP and 100Mb/s Intra minimum for acquisition. When editing - if you aren't using the same codec and bitrate as your original acquisition format, you should be using >150Mb/s Intra (i.e. DNxHD 185 or ProRes HQ 422). For EVS inserts there is a grudging acceptance that ProRes or DNxHD 120 is acceptable.
News use DVC Pro HD 100Mb/s a their standard edit intermediate codec and for Playout. (at 50Hz this is 1440x1080 - which is better than the 1280x1080 it is at 59.94Hz, and still better than HD Cam's 1440x1080 with harsher chroma subsampling than DVC Pro HD)
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I am asking because I would think something that is HD or SD quality on air would be good to re air - especially if it hasn't been transcoded (someone said the transport stream was recorded).
It's still very heavily encoded at emission rate (<15Mbs VBR for HD - average is probably <8Mbs) - and that will cause you horrible concatenation artefacts if you take it back down to baseband and send it round the loop again.
Remember the 2:1 rule of thumb - for every code/decode you should ideally have 2x the data rate going in as coming out to minimise concatenation, assuming the same codec. It's a rule of thumb, but not a bad one.
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Here in the US plenty of shows (especially comedic shows such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Soup and many of the latenight shows) take clips from services that monitor all the channels and re air them in that quality. For some of the cable channels they may record them themselves using a commercial DVR that allows you to playout via HD-SDI. They take the channels as they receive them from the cable or satellite company of their choice and is ingested. For local news they use a media monitoring service like TVEyes which records all stations in every market of the US in the quality they are broadcast in. They then broadcast the clips as is. Probably 99% of the time there is no difference in picture quality from the live production quality broadcast - if there's a difference its likely because the originating source was not up to par.
Yep - in these scenarios you have no choice but to use off-air sourced content. I don't agree that you only see artefacts on 1% of the content though. When I see off-air clips they look significantly poorer than the surrounding studio content - softer and more artefacty.
It's like teletext, sent alongside the vision. To do it as a video feed would take too much bandwidth, There is a feed of the network talkback sent up to the regions too so that is used as well
What vision signal was it being sent with?
Within the VBI of the main NC1 national sustaining feed presumably ?
NC1 for BBC One and NC2 for BBC Two (in the days when there were regional opts on BBC Two). ISTR that you had to ask for an engineer to switch feeds to get the right network's PresFax displayed in the presentation galleries in English regional centres...
Well it will be closed in time for the big EPG changes next year, so expect something new to launch there or a channel to get a nice bump up to 122. Perhaps they'll bring Sky 2 higher up again or try out a new Sky Bravo channel that was rumoured a while back?
I don't think Sky Two will get back into such a prominent EPG slot. Low priority for Sky.
Besides, with the massive clearout of timeshifts and SD/HD simulcasts, a good chunk of channels will benefit from the reshuffle, including Sky Two.
No doubt when Encore is closed next spring; Sky will more likely use EPG 123 for either Challenge or Pick, the next furthest Sky channels on the Sky EPG.
Alternatively, it might as well do the same method of selling slots to another broadcaster, as they did back in February 2011, when they had a deluge of slots freed up from the closures of Bravo and Channel One.
Sky have to be careful about unilaterally moving their own services into more desirable EPG slots - as they have to ensure neutrality in EPG positioning under Ofcom rules don't they?
An amusing clip that sticks in my memory from the channel, around 1999-2000 (post-flags) is someone - possibly a comedian (Tim Vine?) - dropping a pen over the desk, climbing over the desk live on air and shouting "I'VE GOT THE PEN!! I'VE GOT THE PEN!!" while the newsreader awkwardly laughed next to him. Think it was on TV Home at some point recorded from an Auntie's Bloomers/Outtake TV type show.
Stuck in the mind because as a kid I didn't realise it was a comedian and thought it was just one of the regular newsreaders going completely insane on air.
That whole paper review (Was it Peter Coe presenting?) was hilarious - the jumping over the desk was just the culmination of it. I love that Tim Vine is Jeremy Vine's brother!
