BBC News Channel: Presentation

BBC news has now broken away from Breakfast and is simcasting with BBC World with the story about Gilad Shalit. Komla Dumor and Rachel Schofield presenting from N8

Gaddafi capture/death story covered by BBC World instead of the One today.

Lucy H / Mishal H presenting.

2pm

Jane Hill / Mishal Husain .. BBC World / NC Joint coverage.

How long's Huw been in Tripoli?

I see him for the first time at 5pm..

The news channel unable to cover the results of the vote in parliament on Europe tonight live due to it occuring during the BBC News at 10. Again shows the issues of BBC1 bulletins using the News Channel studio

It is a very rare occasion that something happens during the 10 though. The 1 is naturally more common as it's in the middle of the day.

I just switched to BBC Parliament. Is it possible for the News Channel to switch to BBC Parliament's feed whilst keeping their own graphics etc?

To be fair, the NC was able to put up it's own Breaking News caption, along with the usual ticker, while BBC One remained ticker/captionless.

I've seen the NC opt out of the 1 before for breaking news, they usually use a CSO if they need a presenter.

I'm sure there is someone on this forum who could explain the ins and outs of what galleries get used...

My understanding is that there's a switching unit in the N6 gallery which is the equivalent of the presentation mixer for the News Channel. They can select a different source (TC7, N8, N9, maybe even N10, and I would imagine it's probably possible to pick up some VT/servers directly so they can bypass the main gallery to play out a Hard Talk while rebooting the mixer if needed) to go out on the News Channel from this box, and the NC ticker is added downstream of this. So at 21.30 they select N8 on this box and N6 is free to rehearse the 10. I guess it should have been possible to crash into a simulcast of Parliament in a similar way.

The NC astons are usually generated by the same device that does the ticker, but during network bulletins a second Viz unit handles them, and is selected as a downstream key on the main N6 mixer, so that BBC1 can take a feed of the N6 mixer which has the astons but no ticker.

The Breaking News aston that's been mentioned would have been added in the normal way from the Viz that's doing the ticker.

At the risk of sounding a bit Worzel-y, it's nice to see the back wall being used in N6 in this shot - it might not add to a story's value but it looks rather nice, they should use this shot and the back wall more often seeing as they have the advantage of Barco walls:

Drew, is that image taken from tonight's bulletin, just five minutes ago? The reason I ask, is because Sue is supposed to be on with Julian Worricker tonight, and not Chris.

Sorry to come over all rota-ry!