noggin's posts, page 246

CCTV footage on the news

ffmbc is open source. Don't think FIDO is.

I think the BBC is quite cautious with open sourcing internal 'useful bits of software' to avoid allegations of distorting the market place with public subsidies (as SVT have been by both VizRT and ChyronHego over CasparCG) I think that is why Raven remains closed source.

Pure R&D is a different matter - and the BBC have embraced Open Source significantly in that area.

Shows that people forget or get lost in time

Fond memories of that show. Fewer fond memories of another, probably long forgotten, sitcom of around the same era 'That's My Boy' (starring Molly Sugden)

CCTV footage on the news

Yep - dates from the era of SD DV25 - though BBC News in W1 are HD DV100 now.

If ffmpeg/ffmbc can cope with it, FIDO usually can (as it's a - Java I think - wrapper for ffmbc) If ffmbc can't play it - FIDO will spit it out.

Golf OBs or Others - Do they leave cameras outside?

That would be less of an issue if you sold them in a different country with fewer issues... (A lot of stolen kit in the UK doesn't stay in the UK...)

You're right that cameras aren't that useful without a CCU - but that won't kill the market for spares, replacements etc. - and it's not unheard of to deploy more heads than CCUs and re-patch.

In the 90s, it wasn't unusual to see stolen camcorders in use in the Middle East (and I believe Russia) still with their original liveries.



All it takes is someone who doesn't care to buy the gear. If it's stolen to order it would be undetectable.

However manufacturers can and do register serial numbers of stolen gear, so if you take a stolen camera for servicing, or try to buy a new licence (say to unlock high frame rates etc.) you will be detected (as licences are locked to serial numbers).

With newer camcorders (less so with system cameras) there are also diagnostics, cloud services etc. that will be connected to - which may well alert a manufacturer to a stolen camera. (A bit like iPhone IMEIs being registered so that they can't be used if stolen)



A decent box lens is probably worth more than the camera head, and easier to sell on... Removing a camera but leaving the cradle and lens in-situ would probably not be an approach taken. Either you have security or you don't.

One other major reason for leaving cameras out overnight - particularly in winter - is that you avoid fogging due to temperature changes.

CCTV footage on the news

Even less likely to have it on location if you're laptop editing (which is pretty common these days) BBC News have their FIDO app (which is based on ffmbc I think) but that won't do everything.

CCTV footage on the news

Yes to the above. Additionally if you need to get the material on-air fast, shooting a screen with your camera is often the most straightforward way of getting the material on-air.

Finding someone in the CCTV location who knows how to export the footage onto removable media (which you will need to source), and then converting the exported content into a format that can be edited is a non-trivial process that takes time and in some cases a degree of expertise. (I have experience of this...)

New Channel 4 Weather graphics

I'd expect the platform to be independent of the graphic design. (i.e. you buy into the platform, but implement your own 'look')

New Channel 4 Weather graphics

Well I hope they dial the rendering back to 50 frames per second in the UK...

Generation Game to be brought back with Mel and Sue

I'm not. I think Peter is far funnier in scripted roles than unscripted. Mel and Sue have far more experience of 'warm and witty' in that kind of environment.

Blue Screen Spill

Another thing to remember about blue-screen, green-screen etc. and tubed cameras is that because you were saturating one of the colour tubes with high-levels of the colour they were sensitive to, you could end up with 'stick' and 'lag' where the camera tube takes a little while to 'recover' from the peak exposure. On a normal picture this is like a smeary coloured trail (not a comet tail but more a large area smear) - which on normal content doesn't look too bad. However on CSO/Chroma Key stuff it means you get a 'laggy' key.

Also - early CSO didn't have 'hue supression' (now often known as colour cancel). Hue supressors were in widespread use on cameras well into the 90s. The way they worked was that you bypassed the internal PAL coder of the camera (or CCU) and took the RGB outputs from the CCU in two directions.

One RGB (*) output fed the Chroma Key/CSO keyer input. The other RGB output fed an off-board PAL coder via a Hue-supressor. This effectively replaced saturated Green, Red, Blue, Magenta or Yellow elements of the camera output with grey (removing the saturation on the picture colour that you were CSO/Chroma keying off) This helped remove lighting spill and reduced the 'ReadyBrek' aura effects. Very odd when you saw the Hue Supressor switched on - a full colour picture suddenly goes black and white in the saturated blue or green areas. These days it is all done in the mixer...

Without Hue Supression / Colour Cancel you have to light very precisely, and with a lot of separation (and floor bounce is very tricky to handle) to reduce spill and avoid fringing.

(*) Component handling may also have been an option - but in my experience full-bandwith RGB was the usual approach.

Of course now we have 4:2:2 to cope with, we no longer have full-bandwith RGB, which is why Green-screen is a much better choice than blue-screen for a high quality video key these days (as you get much more G content in the full-bandwith Y channel than you do B content, which is mainly carried in a half-bandwith Cb channel)

BBC News links with CBS News Globally

Yes - note I didn't say BBC international outlets couldn't couldn't run ABC reporter-led reports, just that the rules were different.

From memory, at one point, BBC domestic outlets got priority over US local affiliates for bespoke lives from US correspondents, and were second only to ABC network outlets, but BBC international outlets didn't (I'm not sure what live access BBC international outlets got)

Not sure if BBC international had access to the generic 'clock start' lives (i.e. non bespoke) - but I remember BBC domestic outlets taking them too.

BBC News links with CBS News Globally

Almost certainly - the ABC deal had different rules for BBC domestic and BBC international outlets (particularly when it came to ABC reporters)