noggin's posts, page 251

Equinox. A science programme on C4. Was it an American production?

Q.E.D. A science programme on BBC1 that was more populist and light-hearted than Horizon shown on BBC2, before Horizon itself became populist.

It relies on the main opt's gallery keeping the sub-opts gallery director up to date with timings on the main programme as it's going on, which in a lot of cases they don't. Most of the time the timings match what is on the running order, but if the main opt has a couple of lives, they're far too busy trying to keep their own programme to time, never mind trying to keep a sub-opt in the loop. Some directors are actually very good at trying, and some just don't bother. So really what ends up happening is the sub-opt director (in Jersey's case anyway) is literally just watching the main opt go out, and trying to find an ok part to crash back into after the sting.

Any remember Spatz?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t_BxiX-5JU

Or it's successor Cone Zone? Both were by the same writers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8J4D_PElJY

A previous, Saudi-funded, BBC Arabic Television service existed between 1994 and 1996, but was abruptly shut down for being more editorially independent than its backers would have liked. There's a bit of a history (from 1997) here: http://www.preddonlee.com/arabic.html

You would probably feel much more at home with public radio in the US, which has a strong tradition. I know next to nothing about radio in the UK, but US local public radio feels somewhat similar to regional TV news in the UK. Local public radio news stations have much more humble operations than US local TV news stations, and it's all much more driven by NPR's nationally-distributed programs which have allotted time for local inserts each hour. In late morning and early-to-mid evening slots, NPR affiliates in large cities often have 30-60 minute local newscasts that follow the national programs, but not always. Staffing typically consists of one or two anchors and a handful of reporters covering more meat and potatoes issues than what you'd see on local TV.

Compared to the UK, public television in the US never developed a strong tradition of local news coverage, let alone very much national significance. PBS was starved of resources for decades, leading us to the current situation with commercial broadcasters leading in pretty much every area (entertainment, national news, local news, etc.) At least our public radio is pretty healthy.

How does the main studio at Wimbledon operate? For years now it has looked very nice in BBC Sport London 2012 style (and indeed I think it was the only sport to get a London 2012-esque set, a shame it didn't become the house style for a while), yet this year it has a new look.

Today at Wimbledon came from a different, open air studio using the same style desk as seen in Rio and I think also at Euro 2016, but the main indoor studio sports a completely different look - is this a set bought in by Wimbledon itself? If so, why have the BBC been able to have their own design instead for the last however many years?

The stuff I digitised from my VHS/Video 8 collections ended up like that too, I presume it must have been how the capture card/software works. As I said though you don't even notice it 99% of the time. And I'm not going back and re-digitising it all either, it took me months.

Why do the BBC never mention the BBC Sport app available on smart TV's? All courts in HD, unlike the awful red button streams that they always push.

You can do that with digital video too (I've done it in VLC) and the effects are pretty much the same. In fact on quite a few things I notice the chroma only signal sometimes isn't properly interlaced (so it looks filmised or whatever), but added to the 50i luma image you can't tell it apart from sometimes if there's some very saturated colours and fast movement together (I've noticed this a bit on some news reports over the last few years). It does show, how bizzarely little colour information there actually is in a picture.

To throw a wobbler in! We had a fancy zone plate generator to push variable 'concentric circles' through some of the analogue kit and look at the results. Not sure it really told us anything really, we'd switch filters in and out, push it through a DVE etc. I think the engineering department had a bit of cash left over one year so we bought one, more of a lab tool I suspect than a day to day production engineering need!

Isn't it the same with half the vertical colour resolution with digital when we're using 4:2:0 colour subsampling, or am I getting that wrong?

Was STV and tvs the only medium companies to have a full time drama department? The amount of dramas it pushout to the network is alot more than just taggart.