BBC News @ 8pm

Yep - some smaller regions have presentation rather than production mixers - with either no CSO or very limited CSO facilities. Whilst it might be possible to add an upstream external chroma keyer, the regions which have these limitations also will have limited space for the extra lighting required to do a good CSO - and the separation you need between the CSO backing and the presenter mean that it is a lot more than "hanging a curtain".

In these cases - and some larger regions where a chroma key position is tricky to light to the same standard as a screen presentation position - screen presentation is used.

It never fails to amaze me how many armchair directors, producers and engineers there are that post here - who make sweeping statements suggesting they know better than people who work hard doing this as a job every day...

I don't think the 30 minute update is worth it.

Apparently it is a pretty popular bit of it ...

Oh come on noggin, everyone knows it only takes a sony handycam and an avocado shower curtain to do some chromakey. Quit bigging it up

My god, I can hardly believe that something as simple as a chromakey isn't available in every region. That is shameful, and ridiculous. The Truro contributors TV studio at BBC Radio Cornwall has CSO, for goodness sake! ITV Westcountry's Truro sub-regional studio, has green screen, and their whole studio, camera and all is no more than 12 foot from back to front, I've been there. They don't use the recommended 6-8' space between screen and presenter, they use about 4' at most.

You're trying to tell me CSO needs a lot of space for the lights? I don't think so.

Not even region has cso - noggin is right. Either down to the fact the mixer they use can't cope with it or they don't have the facilities. Some studios - like the Channel Islands - are very small. Also a joined up look is very important for BBC One - there is a difference between a full half hour with it's own look and 30 seconds within a 90second bulletin.
And yes the regional element is important - especially the weather.

Yes - but that is a single DTL studio with kit designed for a single DTL studio. Even then most have poorly lit chroma keys with little separation between the foreground and the background meaning you have horrible shadows to try and cope with. In fact most DTL studios have pretty pants foreground lighting on the guests - as the ceilings are too low to get decent results in many.

Odd that the best regional DTL studios were those installed in the late 80s/early 90s with artist painted backdrops. They had proper 3 point lighting, with backup keys, and often looked as good as the studio they were working into. Now we have newsroom cameras lit with a single lamp, or the appalling regional CSO studios like Manchester, where it appears the guest and the CSO backing are lit with the same lamp, and there is no separation so you get permanent Reddy Brek green fringing or a see through guest...

Bad CSO is not the answer - and you can't magic space to do good CSO in all studios where it doesn't exist. (And if you are using on-camera autocue you can't use the nice grey TrueMatte cloth and an LED ring on the camera, as used in BBC NY)



Yes - I've seen it. It is not brilliant.



You need to keep the key shadows off the backing cloth - which means you either have to light people from horrid angles, or have the cloth a decent distance behind the person you are lighting. You CAN compromise - but usually it doesn't look good. You also have to avoid overlighting the CSO backing - you don't want it to go over 70% luminance or it becomes difficult to key - another reason for keeping the guest lights off it.

I imagine the regions that use screens either use it because they can't chroma key, or if they did it would look worse than using their screens.

As to chroma key units in vision mixers - regions with full production mixers will have it, those with presentation mixers may not, unless they purchase a separate unit to upstream key it.

To do a basic (but half decent) CSO you need at least 4 lamps: a key, a fill, a backlight and a cloth flood. As noggin has said, you need the presenter to stand a good 6 feet away from the cloth to avoid the key and fill lamps from overly illuminating the cloth. To do a better job, you can use two independently dimmed backlights falling on left and right shoulders - this, for the 8 o'clock in particular, is very useful as the presenters stand at an angle to the camera and often refer to the images behind them. Being able to add light to that side (screen left) of the presenter can reduce fringing. Finally, to make the whole thing safer, it's wise to have a spare key light and additional cloth flood. Total requirement then: at least 7 lamps.

The problem in some of the smaller regional studios is that the space requirements for their standard news set literally fills the whole space available. I think some correspondents on this forum would be truly amazed how small and cramped some studios are. Shoehorning in a cso cloth and additional 7 lamps has been genuinely tricky, and in some cases impossible.

Now we have Celina Hinchcliff and Luisa Baldini presenting the 90 seconds update! Who next?

Can a mod please close one of these threads... there's no need for two now is there