BBC World News | 30th October 2017 Onwards

Having an SD island in a sea of HD infrastructure might have made sense on someones's spreadsheet, but a wider view often exposes other costs and considerations, such as extra 'glue' and operational complications

Still seems odd that SD only equipment was shipped then.

It could have been 'redeployed' from else where. Quite common for the regions to have 'hand me downs' from London, or other BBC sites for instance.

By the end of the last decade it was quite difficult to purchase new SD kit

At that point it was an SD island in a sea of non-news radio infrastructure on-sitee though. When BBC Arabic and Persian's TV facilities were built there was no other significant TV infrastructure - either SD or HD - on that site (BBC News - both TV and Radio - was still based at TV Centre and would continue to be for 5 years)

The BBC Arabic and Persian facilities were built in Peel (then Egton) before any serious decisions about the TV kit to be installed in NBH for TV News had been decided or procurement processes started ISTR (to avoid chosing systems earlier than was sensible for BBC TV News who were moving from TVC far later), so there were no procurement deals for HD gear already in place. (There was a deal for talkback - as the BBC had decided to go for a single platform on the site for TV and Radio by that point)

It was clear that the output platforms for BBC Arabic and Persian were going to be SD for a significant period (BBC Persian was difficult enough to broadcast in SD because of jamming attempts by the Iranian govt) and they launched with a tight (government supervised) budget which at that point had to be demonstrably independent of BBC News (as they were operated by BBC World Service which wasn't licence fee funded at the time). In 2006/7 it was definitely still possible to buy SD gear, and SD gear was cheaper...

At the time Arabic and Persian were commissioned - BBC News at TV Centre was entirely SD and remained so for a number of years - so there was no SD-HD glue needed initially - again keeping initial costs down.

By the time the main HD NBH build had started, a relatively small amount of SD/HD integration glue for Arabic and Persian wasn't going to be particularly show stopping, and would be a tiny part of the NBH build costs (replicating TV Centre functionality - which had to include SD compatible gear for the regions too)...

As for operational complications - any decently integrated, virtualised, routing systems shouldn't introduce much in the way of those. If you route an SD source to an SD OS on BNCS you get it routed clean, if you route an SD source to an HD destination it automatically routes through an assignable or dedicated up converter, and vice versa via a downconverter (it's just like 4:3 and 16:9 sources and destinations used to be handled when you had both aspect ratios knocking around).

SD and HD media on editing and MAM systems co-exist fine, and on-the-fly exports aren't a huge issue either. Design your routing and production systems effectively and you mitigate operational issues.

Are up converters really needed for the main BH as any decent router/switcher/pro production equipment would have a good one built in and be able to handle it?

What models/sizes are you thinking of. The cheaper end of the market (Black Magic/For A etc) have small (16 x16 ish size) routers with up/down/cross converters (probably ?), but the big station routers (GV/Belden, Evertz, Imagine (aka Harris aka Leitch)) don't; I don't think ?

And up converter (particularly) quality is critical, you would normally go with an external crate of dedicated cards, such as Axon (other mfrs are available)

Up and downconversion functionality isn't standard functionality in most decent-sized broadcast HD-SDI routers. You don't get cross-conversion either. Most routers will route SDI as SDI, 1.5G as 1.5G and 3G as 3G (if they are 3G compatible) - but they don't convert between those formats - they just route them as is. What you route is what you get. That's why you install up/down/cross converters as assignable glue in most installations (or permanent glue in some)

Similarly apart from Kahuna, most broadcast (as opposed to prosumer) switchers don't routinely do up/down conversion either (mainly because you need to factor audio delays in to conversion and doing it in the switcher isn't always a good solution for that) That's very much at the Black Magic/Newtek end of the spectrum. (Some broadcasters will mandate particular quality levels for up and downconversion too. Downconversion in particular is important to get right, as any aliasing present can hammer encoding downstream)

Arguably downconversion is even more important - as bad downconversion can really hammer your SD transmission chain if you don't do a high quality filter to remove aliasing artefacts.

Yes fair point, but really there should be a gentle encouragement to wean folk away from SD where possible, and move forward on to ditching SD:HD simulcasting, if my get my drift

Did anyone see Impact in Studio C, it looked impressive, just missing the opening angles however, Talking Business looked very odd however and the cube floating mid air on the catwalk really was odd.

Here is some highlights from Talking Business
I do like Studio C but Aaron moving about shows that they are constrained by lighting, particularly on the catwalk.


and here is Impact the last time the programme came from Studio C

You got to like BBC World News, they will give it a go with its various colour schemes and programme styles, they get the best out of the studio facilities, unlike BBC News Channel, constantly red and very little variety, the only thing decent is The Papers.