Electronic news-gathering

BECTU appear to have a Channel TV branch, so it's possible that one of their predecessor organisations did too. I don't think there's anything preventing a UK-based union from operating in any of the Channel Islands.

I assumed that 16mm film stock would have been cheaper than portable VT formats in the 70's, even though video is reusable.

They would still have to continuously buy tape stock of course, both as it wore out and also because presumably they'd have kept stock footage

Certainly by the late 80s/early 90s most rushes tape stock was being re-used continuously in BBC regions - so the running costs became very low in consumable terms. Edited inserts were archived, and the occasional stock shot comped, but most rushes tapes were bulk-erased and re-used.

Film stock was pretty expensive, as was running the processing machines. A 30 minute tape would last as long as 3 x 400ft rolls of 16mm film. I don't think the Colour Reversal film that was used in News (that didn't produce a negative, but instead a positive) is widely available now - but it wasn't cheap. Negative 16mm film is around $150-200/400ft roll these days I think. That's $450-600 for the equivalent of a 30 minute Beta tape NOT including processing (and ignoring the fact you could re-use the Beta tape) I think the economics of ENG made sense pretty quickly.

It seems Nottingham had the use of ENG from its First day in January 1982, but we all know what happened... Did Brum get ENG in 1982?

Does anyone know the rest? LIke Tsw? Scottish and of course did Brum get it in 1982?

Don't forget the 1978 strike pre christmas was the big one and was trigerred by a refusal to process a roll of 16mm film

I think you mean the opening sentence the other way around Noggin.

The film for ITN was a myth. BBC processed crates of the stuff for their own consumption.

What did happen in the Falklands was that the security systems on the navy ships knocked out some electronic gear which may well have affected some of the early ENG cameras. Certainly many press photographers found their brand new Nikon F3s wouldn't work apart from the mechanical shutter at 1/60th.

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The film stock generally used at the time was Eastman 7240 and the faster 7250 and yes, it wasn't cheap. It cost though 5p per foot to process in house and 60p per foot using outside processors.

An early example of fast film turnaround was the Aberfan disaster. The BBC had a mobile processing truck which was sent to the location and processed the film shortly after it was shot. Any archive footage you may see was processed less than 200 yards from the disaster. Slow by todays standards although for the era, it was fast.

Any film footage received in the lab at TVC within 5 minutes of the start of the news could and often was processed and tx'd in time for the end heads. The reversal processing was a 20 minute duration, although once clear of the 1st developer and colour developer, could be whizzed through. This would give it a shorter life before fading although the reversal process meant that it could be re-inserted in the process chain after having been tx'd to finish the chemical process properly for archive purposes.

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Interesting. So 30 minutes of 16mm film would be 1200ft - which would have cost £720 to process in an outside lab or £60 in house. And that is ignoring the cost of the stock, which could only be used once and presumably was also significant.

Think that explains the push for ENG in financial terms.

There was a very different attitude back then. A cameraman would go out and shoot something and only use 50-400 feet of film and get the story covered. One of the early criticisms of ENG and PSC was that the cameramen would often shoot hours of material, because they could, which then gave the editing department the headache from hell to turn that in to a 3 minute package.

It was said that film focussed the cameramans mind to get it right first time.

That said, ENG was the obvious way forward for the news environment. Interestingly, programmes like Only Fools would shoot electronically in the studio and then use film outside. This carried on for quite some time.

Yes - that was the BBC standard for decades - electronic studio interiors (usually with moving cameras that tracked and crabbed) and film exteriors (often shot statically on tripods rather than on moving mounts)

Monty Python did a great sketch on it - and it was widespread on most drama and sitcom until at least the mid-to-late 80s. (Howards Way, All Creatures Great and Small, Doctor Who, Blakes Seven, Last of the Summer WIne all spring to mind)

Quite often the exteriors were not only shot on film, they were edited on film, and telecined as a cut sequence (rather than transferring the rushes to VT and editing electronically). The difference in quality and feel was really noticeable, as was the very different style of lighting.

There was some electronic location shooting (which BBC Outside Broadcasts usually handled, though the BBC Film Unit aka TFS also had some UMatic and then Betacam kits) from the early 70s - and in some cases entire dramas were shot entirely OB (quite a lot of early 80s costume drama for instance) and often multi camera, allowing entire cut scenes to be taken into the edit where they were quickly bolted together, rather than every scene having to be cut shot by shot in post.

Childrens were a prominent advocate of using video rather than film quite early on, often using a Single Camera Unit (which was a small production truck with a 1" VTR and proper vision control area to allow a video camera to be properly racked) rather than camcorders.

Quite a few shows started to switch from film exteriors to video exteriors during the late 80s and early 90s - giving a much more consistent look to productions. Some went full circle and started 50i video in studio and 25p film on location, switched to entirely 50i video and then went to 25p film (or film-look HD or SD video) Doctor Who and Last of the Summer Wine both went through this circular route (though only if you include both Doctor Who series)

Yes, though news had no hard and fast minimum technical standards to adhere to. The IBA COP merely
said that 'the best quality should be reasonably obtained', which was a recognition that the pictures themselves were more important than the ultimate quality. The Beeb adopted a similar policy, and really that still lives on today with images sourced from phone cameras etc.

Non programming was a different kettle of fish, and first generation ENG that used U-Matic was a big no-no
for programme production (and rightly so) so 1980s location electronic acquisition involved portable 1inch VTR formats, and portable (rather than smaller ENG) cameras. The Sony BVP-330 and Ikegami 79 were really the
first 'crossover' cameras, that were good enough for production, and light enough for ENG use.

Wasn't until Betacam SP and Digibeta when camcorders could be routinely used for non news productions.

I do agree though the film inserts for location shoots in 70s and 80s drama and comedy, were dire. You'd have been better off using ENG in many cases quite honestly.