noggin's posts, page 66

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NG
noggin Founding member

Top of the Pops

Rkolsen posted:
Was Top of the Pops ever rebranded outside the UK? From 2003 - December 2008, there was a channel here called Mojo HD - featuring only HD content. There was a show called London Live featuring musical acts from London. I was talking to a friend of mine at the the time and he said it sounded like Top of the Pops. Does anyone have any more information about that? If it was indeed TOTP, and if at the time the BBC was indeed filming stuff at the time in HD - well before they launched a linear HD channel - unless it was a Worldwide production where outside customers would want HD?


Later... was shot in HD for the US HD market before BBC HD I believe (they used an Alfacam HD OB truck parked outside TC3 in the ring road, before they used a BBC OB HD truck - Unit 2). Could it have been that?

TOTP was SD 16:9 I'm pretty certain.
NG
noggin Founding member

Newsnight

Worth remembering that you can't just use any font on broadcast outlets - you have to ensure you have paid for and licensed them. It's not always straightforward to buy a font for a 'one off' graphic.

Creative Cloud has made life a lot easier - but some broadcasters are not able to use Creative Cloud because of other licensing and IT limitations, and not all broadcast graphics are created in Adobe environments.
NG
noggin Founding member

International News Presentation: Past and Present

Rkolsen posted:
noggin posted:
irisscanner posted:
NHK World has scrapped all its programmes and is simulcasting its domestic channel with live translation and voice-over updates every 15 minutes.


They are back showing feature programmes (though not those in the EPG) - but pushed back with a ticker underneath, and a QR code top right (presumably to take you to a web site with current information) along with a map tracking the Typhoon.


The QR code that’s on screen above the main strap is unreadable from my iPhone on the HD feed.


Works fine in the UK on my Sony set. What platform are you on? (Do you have any MotionFlow/TrueMotion/Natural Motion, Sharpness, Noise Reduction, Contrast Enhancement enabled on your TV - as that can hammer high frequency detail?)

I know some US 'HD' providers subsample 1920x1080 HD to 1440x1080, 1280x1080 or even 1080x1080 in some situations - and some cable providers heavily pre-process and compress too.
NG
noggin Founding member

Top of the Pops

james-2001 posted:

I seem to remember reading they used one of those machines to colourise some Doctor Whos in the early 90s, mixing the colour from off-air recordings made in the US with a black and white telerecording, and using those machines to warp the off-air to match the distortions of the telerecording (otherwise the colour wouldn't match up).


Yes - they used CLEO to warp the chroma (from NTSC UMatic off-air recordings of standards conversions) back onto the luma from B&W 25fps film telerecordings. The Telerecording process altered the picture geometry, so Charisma was used to match the chroma and warp it back.

Some of those restorations may now be obsolete as chroma-dot recovery (recovering the PAL subcarrier dots from the B&W telerecording) may have been used for more recent releases of the same stories (and the maths of the chroma dots also allows the geometric distortion introduced by telerecording to be deduced and reversed)

CLEO effectively killed the market for Mirage (such that it was in the UK), though I don't think that market was huge (though it was sometimes used in Harry suites). I don't think either the BBC or ITV owned a Mirage - when LWT used it on their Channel Four Friday/Saturday Night Live series, they used one in a Covent Garden facilities house and had to book vision lines both ways to use it (and cameras didn't get tallies as a result...) That said - when Sony demonstrated their System G DVE (a lot of the IP for which went into the first generation PlayStation) - but couldn't ship it, Quantel got a lot of interest in Mirage again...

The market for off-board DVEs has almost disappeared now (in fact it may have entirely - DVEous was the last I was really aware of and since Ross bought Abekas/Accom I'm not sure it still exists) since vision mixers introduced integrated DVE/DME/DPMs (Sony used to sell DMEs as external, but integrated, options - but they are now physically boards within the main mixer crate these days) None of the current integrated Sony or GVG DME/DPM/DVEs can do what Mirage or CLEO can do - letting you design your own 3D shapes - so we could do stuff live in the 80s that we can no longer do live today (though that may not always be a bad thing, it is a shame for some situations)
Last edited by noggin on 12 October 2019 12:26pm
NG
noggin Founding member

Challenge - June 2016 onwards

Neil Jones posted:
james-2001 posted:
I wonder if any of the kids on Small Talk have been watching it now.


They'll all be in their 30's now Shocked
Wonder if they get any repeat fees?


Very unlikely - they won't have been contracted as actors or musicians so won't have had Equity or MU contracts. Their parents will almost certainly have signed consent forms and agreed to a no-fee (or fixed single-fee) contract that will have allowed the BBC (or indie who made it) all rights for future repeat or sales.
NG
noggin Founding member

Top of the Pops

james-2001 posted:
So much pointless picture effects on this era of the show, pictures zooming and flying all over the place on most performances. I imagine they thought it looked impressive at the time, but it looks stupidly dated now, you pretty much never see it these days.


They had just got the first Questech Charisma units I think - which allowed for rotation, 3D perspective, multi-freeze, background channels etc., and since they'd been limited to very basic Quantel effects (they didn't have the Rotator option on their 5001s by the look of it) until then - they pushed them quite hard. (Up until Charisma arrived, you really had to use an Ampex ADO or a Quantel Encore to do decent 'flat 3D' DVE effects. Abekas had some 'pseudo 3D' effects - but ISTR that they weren't really in 3D space. Charisma changed all that, and was far more 'cost effective' ISTR. The BBC bought loads of them - and they were still in use in BBC News well into the 00s)

Back in the day those effects were seen as 'cool' and a way, believe it or not, of making your show more modern. I actually quite like the choices they made in how they used them - but I remember them first time round - when seeing those effects was genuine quite exciting!

Wait until the early 90s when they got the CLEO (Curvi Linear Effects Option) for their Charismas, that let you do Quantel Mirage-type effects (wrapping pictures onto 3D shapes and animating those shapes!). The Clothes Show, Going Live and Top of the Pops all used them. A lot... (CLEO used a Commodore Amiga home micro to design the 3D shapes (using a mouse driven GUI), Quantel's Mirage, dating back to the early 80s, used a Hewlett Packard Mini Computer, with the shapes designed in Pascal computer code, to do the same job...)
Last edited by noggin on 12 October 2019 9:57am
NG
noggin Founding member

International News Presentation: Past and Present

irisscanner posted:
NHK World has scrapped all its programmes and is simulcasting its domestic channel with live translation and voice-over updates every 15 minutes.


They are back showing feature programmes (though not those in the EPG) - but pushed back with a ticker underneath, and a QR code top right (presumably to take you to a web site with current information) along with a map tracking the Typhoon.
NG
noggin Founding member

International Sports Coverage

harshy posted:
noggin posted:
harshy posted:
Sounds like broadcast HDR or will they use HLG?


???

HLG is HDR...

Do you mean HDR10 (i.e. PQ)?

Yeah sorry that's what I meant although I imagine for real time broadcast its HLG


DirecTV in the US are using HLG. Comcast did some test with HDR10 at the Rio Olympics in 2016. You can run HLG and do a fixed-metadata conversion to HDR10 PQ. The UHD HDR version of the 2018 World Cup was SLog3 in the truck and converted to HLG and HDR10 for rights holders who wanted HDR (the BBC took the SLog3 and did their own HLG conversion)
NG
noggin Founding member

Eurosport Player

DVB Cornwall posted:
Also connected is the imminent launch of DPlay the Discovery Catchup service for their FTA content, replacing QuestOD. We'll see when that launches, but I suspect the player structure will be similar to New Eurosport. Whether it gets placed on platforms such as AppleTV we'll need to wait and see.


Ah - DPlay as a brand has been in use in Nordic nations for a while for Discovery-owned channel content.
NG
noggin Founding member

International Sports Coverage

harshy posted:
Sounds like broadcast HDR or will they use HLG?


???

HLG is HDR...

Do you mean HDR10 (i.e. PQ)?
NG
noggin Founding member

TV News Terminology

deejay posted:
Charles posted:

Is the VO, SOT, PKG, NATVO etc. nomenclature used in the UK as well, or do you have different terms?


SOT (sound on tape, occasionally SOF) / UPSOT (up sound on tape) is common, though ACT for actuality is also common in the BBC.

SOVT - Sound On/Off VT is also a common phrase. (UPSOT/UPSOF/UPSOVT should be reserved for a run that starts with OOV and then has an UPSOT when the presenter stops talking)
Quote:


VIS is common in the BBC when the presenter is to be brought back into vision, but I have seen freelancers put NCIV ‘Newscaster in vision’ which causes some confusion the first time it’s seen by BBC lifers!

BIV (Back in Vision) is often also used in scripts (along with PRES or the presenter name)
NG
noggin Founding member

BBC News | NBH Protests

Worzel posted:
Not been mentioned on the News channel or the BBC website though. Have they got some sort of black out going on about the story?

Surely it can't be too difficult to point a camera out of one of the windows or use the skyline camera at Langham Place pointing at All Souls Church? Laughing Wink


The BBC usually keep coverage of demonstrations outside the BBC (which are quite regular) to a minimum. There is a strong argument that reporting them as major stories encourages future protests as a way of getting publicity for your cause.