BBC News Channel Presentation - 21/03/16 onwards

Another Simon-ism on Afternoon Live just now.

Simon was reporting on the Royal Wedding and that a pastry chef has been designated the role of creating the cake with full details of the ingredients that the cake would include.

Cue Simon with a long pause and with no sign of sincerity exclaimed "... not long to go..."

Clearly these next two months with the Royal Birth and Wedding are going to be hell-ish for him!

I take it the bosses said no to him booking the time off in April then!

From images seen over the years on Twitter BBC News appear to have X number if Viz engines and use them across a larger number of channels / output. I wonder if the cost to increase this for all regions (the peak concurrent usage) means it would be too expensive and they end up with some other solution or would they be able to negotiate a better deal given they will all be in use at the same time for less than 90 minutes per day.

I believe Viz also has developed or is in the process of allowing graphics to be rendered in the cloud. It would be perfect individual regions for their packages where graphics could be keyed into the package and burnt in perfectly. It would allow each region to have great graphics.

Give it time, Simon will become the next Royal correspondent.

George Alagiah returns to the BBC with a documentary called ‘The Queen: Her Commonwealth Story’ next Monday at 9pm on BBC One.

He had that job at Sky News 25 years ago!

You'll note that I said standardise but deliberately didn't suggest on what That said, the ViLoR project allowed them to provide VCS Dira playout for the local stations which wasn't viable with conventional kit, so it might be possible.

There is at least one Open Source CG solution that could perfectly replicate the current BBC News on-screen look for the price of a decent PC and a BMD HD-SDI output card - without the hefty cost of a Viz licence for every engine...

Rendering in the cloud would be an option for recorded packages - IF you have time - but still doesn't solve the problem of 15 or so galleries all simultaneously needing to be able to do live captions for studio and OB items. If you have a live CG then you have no need to pre-caption your recorded content.

The BBC already have a pretty good deal with Viz AIUI - as they have a LOT of engines across News, Sport and Sport News output across the corporation.

Whether this will scale for every English region though - when other, more cost-effective, solutions are available for the reduced flexibility that the regions require is a different question.

The other big question is whether ViLor-for-TV will deliver an off-site IP solution in a sensible timescale, or of instead a simple, one-size-fits-every-region HD-SDI solution can be designed that gives every SD region an identical HD functionality. If you have a single design you significantly reduce individual design and build costs for each regional centre. You could fabricate off-site and effectively deliver a couple of bays of gear with server, mixer, matrix, CCUs and CGs already installed and prewired.

They've just used one of those VTs which I thought were exclusive to the BBC website for the story about Cynthia Nixon running for New York Governor - no voiceover, just some happy little text rolling up and down over some pretty shoddily edited video.

They then crashed out of it (this on BBC One HD) into a 5live promo.

Checking back, they crashed rather unceremoniously out of the bits-and-bobs loop into the News Channel at 18:44. Is this usual? I think I've always assumed they ran the clips package for the whole regional half-hour.

Afternoon Live and News Nationwide just now joined Amy Garcia, Paul Hudson and Harry Gration live from Otley on their Sofa Relay across the region for 50 years of Look North and even looked through some archive clips of Harry during his time on Look North.