London Live

This video might interest some - a little review of the D800 for live video:

Interesting. London Live just played out an advert for Tesco Ireland during a break this morning. Complete with prices in Euros. Presumably Comux are just playing out any old adverts at the moment?

The D800 is the camera London Live are using for location shooting. (It doesn't shoot 1080/50i or 1080/50p - though it does shoot 720/50p, so if they are running an SD (unlikely they are running a 720p studio/post set-up?) operation they could shoot with 50Hz motion on location if they wanted to I guess, but have decided not to?)

They are using D4s in the studio, but they too appear to only run 1080/25p or 720/50p - with no 1080/50i or 1080/50p option - so if they wanted smooth studio motion they'd need to run at 720/50p for capture (though I believe the live output can be cross-converted to 1080/50i)

Running the studio cameras 25p does give the studio a very 'recorded' feel.

Watching the pilots, it reminds me heavily of the early days of "Live TV". A small amount of content spread very thin.

I also get the feeling that a lot of the ideas haven't been fully thought through. Their weather appears to be coming from a touch-screen controlled Macbook with different Safari tabs. The web pages can be zoomed and navigated by multi-touch. Which is great, except that the presenter has to stand in front of the map a lot of the time with her back to the viewer to change what we see. (Though this presumably means less prep time as it isn't a graphics stack)

And because the text on the map is so small they have to go full-frame a lot for you to be able to see anything on the map. Which means the plasma has to be small in frame to avoid jump cuts...

As the main Breakfast show is single-headed (Marc Edwards) it's a bit "man trapped in the telly"... He's noticeably better than most of their other presenters. Gavin Ramjaun is fine as well - as you'd expect. Their Breakfast weather presenter is obviously very inexperienced... Their location reporters aren't that bad in some cases though - certainly relatively speaking.

It's going to be interesting to see how things change before launch.

They're obviously having the usual graphic nightmares - though you never know how much of a pilot is being concentrated on. (There may be fewer staff, they may be concentrating on different aspects of the operation for different pilots etc.)

Testing now seems to be properly encrypted rather than just FTV. No more pilot watching for us.

I suspect they didn't realise they were as easy to view as they were...

It might not have been a bad idea to keep these tests FTV, as the feedback they might get from this thread alone could be quite useful from a technical point of view.

Assuming they want feedback. I've seen community media groups be actively hostile to people giving any sort of criticism to their work in the past, generally blaming genuine issues on other broadcasters budgets being too high and anything else as being from outside their target audience. As long as the money keeps coming in, it doesn't matter what the audience think.

In my experience - there will be enough internal discussion and criticism - they won't want or need any from others, who don't know the full circumstances of the piloting process, or what it is aiming to achieve.

This is the outside of the LondonLive at the Evening Standard. Looks like a football ground inside.

Hi guys,

I work in Northcliffe House on the second floor, just where London Live is going to be based. They've been rehearsing day and night. The studios look bright, and there's often going to be a newsroom backdrop as I understand. I'll try and get a little bit more information if I can.

Weekend news lineup is a bit thin:
http://www.standard.co.uk/londonlive/london-live-announces-weekend-news-and-current-affairs-line-up-9208206.html

Not even short news bulletins. Back to BBC/ITV London at the weekends then.