noggin's posts, page 297

Do the proms ever finish on time?

That was true for one sequence, but for another they cut to audience shots around the nations and Hyde Park and overlaid them over the RAH.


Suspect most venues were via satellite so you'd need to send them an early cue track such that the round trip delay from the RAH and back meant the resulting contribution was in sync with the RAH. (You do this by sending a signal out from the RAH, getting the remote OB to send it back to you via their normal contribution path, and measure the time delay. You then advance the cue track you send by that amount of delay and dedicate that track to that OB. The longest delay in the path determines how early you have to run the cue track in London for all the remote OBs to start at the right time to be in sync by the time they reach London)



I'd be surprised. I'd expected them to be satellited back given that the venues weren't places you'd expect to have fibre connectivity - and even with microwave and non-dark fibre you'd expect some codec latency to be introduced anyway.

Do the proms ever finish on time?

Nicely done then. Though from memory each OB in that sequence was playing a different piece rather than cutting between OBs all playing the same piece.

2016 Paralympic Games

Not in the UK, not these days. In the days of the BBC having its own OB division and trucks, it was entirely possible for a production to use an entirely BBC crew. Those days are long gone - though often it's not unusual to see a largely ex-BBC crew on some events...

You certainly see the same sound, EVS and camera crew working on shows irrespective of whether the truck is from CTV, Arena, Visions, Cloudbass etc.

1996 Manchester Olympic Games Bid - IBC in Granada?

I suspect the OTCAs were used by BBC Sport quite heavily in to the 80s (and into the 90s) where they took all sorts of sport down-the-line with no on-site presentation or commentary teams.

2016 Paralympic Games

Not sure of your point. CTV don't produce the coverage, they provide the OB truck (and engineering support for the truck) that the BBC Sport production team sit in to make it.

They may well subcontract out RF cameras and links to Broadcast RF or Timeline.

The director/producer work for BBC Sport. Often there will be a Production EM who also works for/to BBC Sport (either staff or freelance). The camera and sound crew (apart from a guarantee or two) are likely to be freelance, as are a good chunk of the EVS and Vision Operation team. There is likely to be a CTV EM or UM managing their side of the operation. (I'm not diss-ing CTV - they're a great company. But they would be the first to admit that the Boat Race looks the way it does because of the BBC Sport team, not the CTV team - whose job is to deliver the BBC Sport requirements)

The expertise in producing sports coverage is in knowing 'how' to cover them editorially and visually - not in how to plan the cable routes, sort power and parking, and configure the router (important as those skills are)

Strictly looks pretty much the same (apart from the obvious location-driven changes) at BBC Studioworks in Elstree and when produced as an OB (probably also using CTV) at Blackpool. That's because the production team are the same - even though the resource company is different.

2016 Paralympic Games

National Anthem



Yes - OBS are now covering more and more of the Olympic events themselves, but they do still subcontract some coverage to other broadcasters who are willing to provide effort and have experience in quality production of specific sports (hence the BBC covering Rowing and Tennis - due to their Boat Race and Wimbledon expertise)

2016 Paralympic Games

Not really. The BBC were contracted directly by OBS to provide Olympic Rowing coverage. I'm sure they would have provided Paralympic Rowing coverage if OBS had contracted them too. It doesn't really relate to the BBC broadcasting the event.

The BBC aren't covering it because OBS aren't paying them too, not because C4 have the rights.

Suspect because Rowing is a much smaller event at the Paralympics, OBS couldn't justify the cost of full (any?) coverage given their reduced budget compared to the Olympics, hence C4 covering it using their own cameras.

(SVT - Swedish national broadcaster - no longer have Olympic rights, and historically did the horizontal and vertical jump coverage. YLE picked that up this time around, as they have historically provided the rest of the athletics coverage. YLE promptly subbed it out to SVT - who continued to do it...)

1996 Manchester Olympic Games Bid - IBC in Granada?

Ah - there may have been in the earlier days - not sure how big it would have been, probably suitable for a small number, rather than the size of a studio (which is what was needed for some set-ups)



Sadly a broken link - but yes, there were definitely specialised facilities available out-on-the-road for that.

Do the proms ever finish on time?

Don't think they use any synchronisation for Last Night.

I have a feeling that the continuous performances from the OBs that we saw towards the end where the RAH continued to play - were pre-recorded (though can't be sure) - and the RAH orchestra were certainly not in sync at the end (as they were still playing when the OB bounce had finished)

The overlaid shots from the Proms in the Park were all so wide as to be non-sync (and if they didn't take the sound from teh OB you were seeing you'd be none the wiser). (The 5.1 balance was pretty consistent throughout too)

2016 Paralympic Games

True - though the BBC were still leading the way internationally at Beijing 2008 in terms of output and coverage. The amount - and qualtiy - of the coverage made available by OBS was also far reduced though.

It's easy to beat the BBC with a 'C4 are doing it better than the BBC ever would' stick, but it is important to remember that London 2012 was a game-changer, and not just because of C4. The British public really got behind it as an event, the IPC made it 'bigger', OBS covered it better, and C4 gave it more coverage. In a game of 'what if's' I suspect we would have seen the BBC do a lot more in 2012 than in 2008 if they had retained the rights, though not to the C4 level.

I also think it often benefits the Paralympics to have a different national rights-holder to the Olympics, because then it is never 'second fiddle' to the Olympics coverage.

Sky News 2015 new look

Not sure what you mean by that comment.

Sky have run remote and robot cameras for years that could integrate with automation just as remote cameras on tracks can. (That said, tracked cameras may be cheaper to install than free-roaming robots)

Tracked cameras don't mean automation (they are manually operated for pop concerts for instance). Non-tracked remote cameras can be automated.

Do the proms ever finish on time?

With a conductor playing them at the tempo they wish (not to a backing track...), with an audience who will decide when they want to applaud and for how long etc., and with no full rehearsal of the event.

Proceedings don't have to be delayed to run long, some things just take longer than you estimate.

However when scheduling you would usually take the shortest estimate as your run time, rather than a longer estimate, as over-running is always a lot easier to accommodate than under-running. The last thing you want to have to do on a network is run short filler content to keep the network on-time after a show finishes early. You wouldn't want to go to the next show early (particularly if it is live) and run the network early as people won't miss the start of programmes if they start late, but they would if they started early.