General Presentation/Logistics Questions

Yep - though Ultimatte has done a decent job for years - as have chroma-keyers fed properly from RGB (or Component) analogue CCU outputs, even with composite mixers. In those days, hue suppressors were applied upstream of the encoder, but downstream of the RGB/YPrPb outputs that fed the keyer, so the source being keyed went B&W in the suppressed colour range on the composite source preview monitor when the hue-suppressors were enabled!


And presumably you were keying off the red channel? (Lower content in the luminance channel so a lower resolution key source as most of the detail is in the half-bandwith Cr channel?)



Yep - though automatic sampling has created a new generation of vision mixers who don't know how to do it manually and understand acceptance and rejection angles, how to do a combined luma+chroma key etc...



Very common on graphics - it's not a commonly used colour!

Over on the Daybreak thread, bpmikey is talking about "lens flare" in the titles. What is that, exactly? Can anyone post an image of what that effect is?

Here is a lens flare:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_WQWiNgjuPcw/S-wub262LXI/AAAAAAAABoo/AXar3EyuOSU/s1600/Lens_flare.jpg

It's when sunlight gets directly into the camera lens and creates these effects. If you move the camera while a lens flare is apparent you can get some very nice effects. Some post production (editing) systems can generate lens flares, the motion of which you can adjust and track. Lens-flare effects if applied correctly can look extremely good. They can also look utterly cheesey.

A quick look on the net has thrown up these links which explain more:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/lens-flare.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_flare

Lens flare actually has 2 meanings, or rather 2 different effects. All lenses produce flare all of the time, they don't need to have a bright light source to cause this. The engineering defination of lens flare is the lift in black levels caused by the diffuse scattering of light in a lens. Basically the cumulative strength of light across the entire lens area will create a black lift, and this will be dynamic and change from shot to shot. This can greatly upset the colour balance of the blacks and all professional cameras have RBG flare correctors built in. To set these up you need a test chart with a 'gregory hole' (a pure black area which consists usually of a recessed felt lined box which reflects no light). As the camera is iris'd up, the gregory hole level should remain stationery, but flare in the lens will cause it to rise. The flare correcters are adjusted to correct for this, for each colour channel. seeeeemples!

For general cheesey lensfare: See regional ITV titles and generic graphics (including anything made by ITV Central, they overuse it!)

Interestingly when keying on IR, the colour isn't red, but is actually a sort of sickly paltry green colour as the Di-chroic filter blocks seem to direct the IR mostly toward green. IR does however cause blurriness and strange things to happen to the picture, which is a shame as it keys quite well. Ah well!

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Golf buggy, maybe? I did see a couple of them about on Wednesday.

You know me, Noggin, always complaining about something! On this day of nothing but OBL, at least BBC World haven't cocked up the spelling on astons and straps, like they normally do. But who's' job is it to "type-in" the content of those straps? Is it a vision mixer or just a secretary? Also, today's events served to verify that outlets have Obits for almost everyone, including terrorists. OBL's was played today several times, voiced by Rachel Harvey. Assuming Rachel had decided to leave the BBC before the demise of OBL, would they have to do the obit again, and is there a system that captures such a circumstance to ensure that revoices are done if someone leaves?

Who types the astons varies from programme to programme. Astons themselves were notoriously difficult machines to work (utterly unlike any other captioning system on the market, and certainly not like computers in terms of the way the OS worked or even, at times, the logic by which they worked.) However, they were superb at what they did even if they did it in their own sweet way. As a result, people specialised in being an Aston Operator - they usually typed in the captions, according to a list supplied by the programme - often by the Production Assistant. A lot of people in the industry used to say that Aston kept their machines modus operandi deliberately awkward so as to keep Aston Operators in work.

Around 20 years ago BBC News decided to do away with Aston Operators and a clever chap at the BBC wrote a piece of software that integrated with the then computer system BBC News used, ENPS"]BASYS. The details required on captions were put into Baysis by the Production Assistants and the software created the astons automatically in a predefined style on demand. His Basys InterGrated Text EDitor (BIGTED) program is still used across almost the whole of BBC News to this day. Nowadays, it's up to the journalists to put the aston details into the ENPS system (ENPS replaced BASYS from about 1997 onwards). As far as I know in News programmes generally, caption details are put in as part of the journalist's work.

Going back to the CSO colour question, the old Studio N in Manchester used yellow to key the behind the shoulder graphics on Look North

Works with VizRT too. What ever happened to Viz rollout, ISTR every region was meant to be Viz ready by 2009, AFAIK 3 regions have it.

Bigted is used quite extensively, but integrated throught the 'Multimedia Object Server, or MOS. MOS allows all the relevent systems to communicate, and scripts typically have MOS items inserted which can cue up server clips and create Aston content. So yes, the journalist puts the info in but as part of the running order, MOS then transfers this to Aston.
Basys, phew, that takes me back!. huge 600MB disk drives and green screen dumb terminals. It was nice to see them all in the skip to be honest