BBC News Channel: Presentation

Arabic has the older style walls like what were installed in the two national news studios at TVC whilst Persian will have the same model as installed in BBC World News.

I forget how big that wall is, how many cubes is it made out of?

At IBC this year Barco were showing off the touch interfaces to their video walls that use digital cameras and an IR curtain to be able to send accurate touch commands back to the Viz sytem generating the graphic. This allows the presenter to trigger transitiions in the graphics by touching the correct part of the screen.

I knew better than to ask for the pricelist. Experience tells me that it falls into the 'if you have to ask, it's too expensive' bracket.

But their HD versions of their monitoring RP screens with their controllers were quite obviously better than the SD RP screens we have driven by Miranda Kaleido K2 controllers in the Bush NOC by a considerable margin.



I've not had the chance to see the Arabic screens close up, but I'm surprised they are being calibrated manually as they are looking perfect. I'd love to know whose job it is to calibrate them - unless we just keep calling back Dega every month to look after them.

The Persian wall is pretty small, only 3 or 4 panels IIRC , so I wasn't expecting it to auto calibrate. Although from the look of the Barco catalogue it might not be an optional extra any more on the new range of panels, so all new video walls get auto calibration whether you want it or not.

Barco are the experts when it comes to auto calibration. Years ago I remember setting up a BarcoGraphics CRT projector with an iris card. The projector put a series of green lines on the screen and captured them through it's digital camera, then you watched it project red and blue lines which it moved around until they matched the positions of the green lines. It was never quite as perfect as a full manual convergence, but a full manual convergence took me at least 30 minutes and the iris did it in about 5 minutes.

Arabic is a 4x2 wall and Persian is a 5x2 wall. Different sized cubes though.

We are both talking about the wall at the end of the newsroom away from the main studio area in Persian? I don't remember it being very big.

What with CIN overrunning a little, it meant that the countdown to the News at Ten was shown (pretty much) in its full length - literally to the very end!
http://vid160.photobucket.com/albums/t176/zukeylukey/CINOverrunning.flv
Youtube link: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ukGCgLiYtGc

Jesus! What the hell has happened to BBC News this year?

Err...what?

Watch the video! There's 57 seconds of dead air at the end of the countdown.

They also had started the countdown later than usual so as not to hit the top of the hour dead on.

Because of CiN, waiting for network to be ready to join for the ten.

I know, but still! It was avoidable. My original comment stems from the general amateurishness of BBC News output since the cutbacks and "refresh", not just from this unscheduled minute of silence.

I think they've got better of late. The first few months after the restructuring in April were a bit hit and miss but that's to be expected. I think over recent months the output has become a lot better. I'm certainly noticing fewer cock-ups and the transitions between BBC NC and BBC One are going smoothly now too.