noggin's posts, page 71

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NG
noggin Founding member

Naga Munchetty | BBC DG Overturns Ruling

Brekkie posted:
Retreading old ground but the China editor role is simply not on a par with the Washington role, whoever is in that position.


Yes - agreed. The pool of fluent Mandarin speaking Editors is far smaller than those that speak English, so presumably should command a premium.
NG
noggin Founding member

40th anniversary of the ITV strike

Markymark posted:
noggin posted:


By 1984 the move to 1" C-format was almost complete.


Although I think Quad was still being used to playout stuff that was originally mastered on Quad?


Yes - and until relatively recently for transfers.

AIUI the BBC no longer own a single Quad 2" VTR (at least one that works) - and their 2" archive is now at the BFI?
NG
noggin Founding member

Channel 5 general discussion

Neil Jones posted:
To be honest I'm surprised Bake Off didn't get squashed into a 60 minute format for Channel 4, though I suppose the rationale behind it was an extra ad break or two if it runs in a 75 minute slot, whereas if it was a 60 minute schedule it would only run for your regular 48 minutes.


One of the big worries about GBBO going to C4 was that some of the charm would be lost if the content was shortened and tightened up for ad breaks. The team behind it, and the C4 commissioners, guaranteed it wouldn't be shortened in the move.
NG
noggin Founding member

Loose Women | 21 Years Old - Sept 2020

JKDerry posted:
noggin posted:
Jonwo posted:
The differences between American and British studios is like night and day, The Talk has vast amount of space whereas Loose Women is quite cramped in comparison


Yes. TC2 was described as one of the 'small' TV Centre studios when BBC Studios and Post marketed them. (The other small studios were TC5 - which was latterly a sport buy out, and TC7 - a news buy out).

I suspect the US equivalent shows come from studios more the size of TC3 (and 4/6/Cool, which were described as 'Medium' and which were the homes to comedy panel shows with audiences - but TC3 is now split in half (one half for This Morning, one half for GMB)

Just for a little reference, at the other end of the day, the NBC late night talk shows are produced from very small studios compared to The Graham Norton Show and The Jonathan Ross Show here in the UK.


Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon is made in Studio 6B in New York, which is only 3,690 Sq Ft in space.

Late Night with Seth Meyers is made in Studio 8G in New York, which is only 2,280 Sq Ft in space.

Compare those to shows to The Graham Norton Show and The Jonathan Ross Show who both use TC1 at Television Centre in London, which is huge in comparison at 10,800 Sq Ft.


Yes - the US daily talk shows are very 'compact'. Couple of chairs, desk, host chair and small audience (and sometimes a compact house band), compared to the UK weekly ones.
NG
noggin Founding member

Loose Women | 21 Years Old - Sept 2020

Jonwo posted:
The differences between American and British studios is like night and day, The Talk has vast amount of space whereas Loose Women is quite cramped in comparison


Yes. TC2 was described as one of the 'small' TV Centre studios when BBC Studios and Post marketed them. (The other small studios were TC5 - which was latterly a sport buy out, and TC7 - a news buy out).

I suspect the US equivalent shows come from studios more the size of TC3 (and 4/6/8 ), which were described as 'Medium' and which were the homes to comedy panel shows with audiences - but TC3 is now split in half (one half for This Morning, one half for GMB)
Last edited by noggin on 24 September 2019 11:13pm
NG
noggin Founding member

Government to suspend Parliament

Newsroom posted:


Hence by earlier post and to quote “Who the hell is directing this morning’s output”.

It was chronic to watch live.


I think you mean who was 'producing' or 'editing' this morning's output. The director just gets what the producer or editor has put in their running order on-air.

I'd hope people posting here were aware of the difference between a producer and a director...
NG
noggin Founding member

40th anniversary of the ITV strike

JKDerry posted:
Steve in Pudsey posted:
In 1968 there had just been a franchise change and facilities from an outgoing company were available. Not the case in 1979, and by that time ITV was in colour, the equipment was therefore more complex and less amenable to a management run effort.

So by 1984 the equipment was different for the Thames management to run an emergency schedule? Was there progress from 1979 to 1984?


Yes. Huge changes. In 1979 Quad 2" was the main VTR standard. These were expensive, complex machines that required a lot of TLC. (I don't think Channel could afford to own even one of them?) Quad 2" technology dates back to the '50s - it had been upgraded to support colour - but the technology was pretty complex to operate.

By 1984 the move to 1" C-format was almost complete. These VTRs were orders of magnitude easier to operate, and significantly cheaper. Not as simple as Beta SP or UMatic (which are basically like using VHS) - but far, far less complex than 2".

All of the other kit - cameras, vision mixers etc. had also got simpler, and digital frame store synchronisers were in more widespread use. TV production had got a LOT easier between 1979 and 1984. (The Moscow Olympics in 1980, despite the boycott, was a huge catalyst for change. It was the first time - I believe - that the BBC used 1" VPR 20 portable VTRs in anger for single camera shooting for instance)
bilky asko, UKnews and Ne1L C gave kudos
NG
noggin Founding member

Government to suspend Parliament

JamesLaverty1925 posted:
Why haven't they ushered everyone inside yet? I can hardly hear this interview with the chap from Bristol Law School over the rain!


Inside where? There won't be broadcast positions inside the court that people will have security clearance to enter, nor will there be broadcast facilities rigged there.
NG
noggin Founding member

What happened to the TV websites being a proper websites?

Yep - the BBC used to produce websites independent of TV and Radio content, and many of these were pretty hand coded. The costs of producing this content was reasonably high, the BBC was expanding into an area it had previously not worked in (it was a new area) and competing with new players, and a decision was taken to scale back and effectively stop web-only production outside of News, Sport and corporate, and concentrate on reducing the production costs for the websites it continued to produce. This also co-incided with one of the many BBC cost-cutting exercises...

The BBC moved to a new system with automatic production of blog, programme pages and iPlayer pages, with general Journalist, TV and Radio (i.e. not separate web) production staff being able to produce and edit these pages using a standard production system, just like News and Sport were already doing for their online service.

Other broadcasters around Europe have largely followed this - ceasing bespoke page and website production and moving to a News, Sport News, Catch Up TV and Blog model generated through production systems that non-web specialists can use to publish/create and edit online content.
NG
noggin Founding member

TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

bluecortina posted:
noggin posted:
bluecortina posted:

I’m pretty sure the bandwidth differences in I and Q were dropped for all intents and purposes as the years went by. My personal experiences with NTSC was in standards conversion etc, NTSC was a lot ‘better’ than people give it credit for, based usually on domestic pictures.


.... Yes - the extra costs involved in non-equiband coding meant it was never really deployed AIUI (both in coders and decoders). NTSC is fine in controlled studio environments, but the lack of any phase correction (and thus hue errors) does mean that once it's being distributed on analogue cable networks and broadcast terrestrially, it degrades more quickly and even small phase/hue errors are really noticeable to the eye.

....


RCA were well aware of the advantages of phase alternation when developing NTSC but they considered the extra complication in receivers to be too expensive - we are of course talking about the early 50’s before the invention of the transistor etc! I read a detailed technical paper about their experiments with phase alternation at the time but I’ll be blowed if I can find it now despite much Googling over the years. Dr Bruch was maybe not so clever after all.


Oh - the past is a different country! There were all sorts of other chroma systems looked at in the 50s and 60s. The Russians came up with a version of SECAM not that different to PAL, and then there were proposals to have dual standard TVs (after all the UK and France had already done this) to allow for 50Hz and 59.94/60Hz content to be broadcast at native frame rate (frame rate conversion was still 'point a camera at a long-persistence phosphor telly' style and not very good) The plan was to have a single subcarrier frequency (not-ideal) for two different line/field standards - and transcode the chroma from NTSC 3.58 to a higher subcarrier frequency that would also be used for 50Hz broadcasts. The Dutch (presumably Philips/Norelco influence was strong) were major proponents of this approach AIUI.
NG
noggin Founding member

TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

bluecortina posted:

I’m pretty sure the bandwidth differences in I and Q were dropped for all intents and purposes as the years went by. My personal experiences with NTSC was in standards conversion etc, NTSC was a lot ‘better’ than people give it credit for, based usually on domestic pictures.


Yes - the extra costs involved in non-equiband coding meant it was never really deployed AIUI (both in coders and decoders). NTSC is fine in controlled studio environments, but the lack of any phase correction (and thus hue errors) does mean that once it's being distributed on analogue cable networks and broadcast terrestrially, it degrades more quickly and even small phase/hue errors are really noticeable to the eye.

PAL is more robust, and can be decoded more cleanly these days (the 8-field sequence allows for some clever maths to almost completely eliminate cross-colour/cross-luma)

SECAM was the most robust chroma format (the FM modulation is bomb-proof, and using vertical sub-sampling makes its life easier) - but the compromises involved mean it has a very distinctive 'look', and practical studio implementation was a nightmare (you can't mix SECAM signals in the way you can PAL or NTSC, and keying also causes some nasty artefacts if not done properly)
NG
noggin Founding member

TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

bluecortina posted:
Markymark posted:
Neil Jones posted:
Interesting to spot "Carlton TV" on the SMPTE bars there..
"Rock Steady", according to TV Cream, was an "awful, awful, awful Channel Four ‘quality music’ show". I can't possibly comment. Was that on Channel 4 at the same time this went out?


Point of order, not SMPTE bars, ITV/4 used EBU 75% bars for line up I think?, (The Beeb 95% EBU?)


In all my years within ITV I never saw anything other than 100.0.100.0 colour bars used on a routine basis. Perhaps sometimes radio links might have used lower saturation bars to test a link. The fact that a transmitter could not routinely handle ‘full’ bars was not of any real concern to the contractors as it was not their area of responsibility and they never expected to transmit fully saturated bars. Naturally we had other colour bar test signals available but they were not used routinely.

I note on the linked site that no mention is made of the difference in bandwidth of the I and Q signals, but I have it in the back of my mind somewhere that this was practically ignored and may indeed have been phased out as time went by. Obviously that wouldn’t have affected the signal amplitudes of RGB which is the point under discussion here of course.


I & Q was really only relevant to NTSC - and although a nice optimisation, the reality was that the different bandwidths weren't exploited, and both I & Q components were handled at the lower bandwidth AIUI. I think modern NTSC coders and decoders are 'equiband' and code and decode in the U and V domain and handle the phase shift?