Is any regional news still 14:9?

PST is normally the next thing to go to air. The vision mixer/director will select the next shot on the PST bus and then cut/mix to it.

The PST output sometimes goes to a monitor on the studio floor so the presenter can see what's coming up although most of the time it's not that useful as it's normally just showing a freeze frame of the next server port but it can be if they're waiting for a something live to go to. In a playout environment it's more useful, although again you only normally see a freeze frame rather than a Vt clock countdown

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sharl/5289852/

It's on one of the monitors, I just wondered what it meant.

EDIT: Thanks both of you.

Sometimes - but most galleries don't work quite like that.

In most galleries (news and non-news) PST is used as the next non-camera source (though this isn't a hard and fast rule). Most vision mixers will hot cut cameras (particularly on interviews and music numbers), and will only pre-set cameras if they need to mix to them.

Usually the source on PST is the next VT, graphic or OS, rather than the next shot per se. In some cases you have to PST the next shot if you can't hot cut to achieve the required result - such as doing a Key+BGND transition (where you want to cut to the next shot with a graphic keyed over) - though more modern mixers let you do cleverer things than this (such as setting up virtual sources with keys attached to them - so you can hot cut to the source with the key)

Lets not forget those sport monkeys who call their primary EVS replay machine ELVIS. And then the second machine COSTELLO. Most amusing.

And any TV station that bought an archive system called DIVA - they then realise that it's not actually an abbreviation... it's a description of how it acts!

My post earlier was somewhat misleading actually having re-read it. While Mixer PST and Mixer Preview are sometimes mislabelled on stacks and matrices, they do exist as different things and serve different functions.

In some very simple galleries there often isn't a preview bank so anything that's previewed is ofen 'preset' first so that sound and pictures can be heard and seen on the main monitors. (Remember that its only in very recent years that full colour monitor stacks have become common, so anything that the director or gallery wanted to preview properly had to be switched to one of only a handful of colour monitors in the stack). In more complex set ups the Preset bank on the vision mixer (the next source) also drives the Preset Monitor in the stack so the director/vision mixer can see the next thing (I've sometimes heard this referred to as the Look Ahead monitor). Often there is also a Preview bus which is separate to the programme output and used simply as a place to look at whatever needs to be looked at - the next VT, the next OS, whatever. The director might use it to preview something while the vision mixer uses the rest of the desk to rehearse or set up. In galleries with vision mixers that don't have a bespoke Preview bus, an Aux Delegate Bus can be used to achieve a similar effect (though sound monitoring can sometimes be an issue...)

Incidentally while the main on-air bank on the vision mixer has its Preset bus (Mixer PST) any additional M/E banks on the desk also have their own Preset busses which might also be visible on the stack - so you might well see on monitor stacks a host of abbreviations like PGM, PST, M/E1 PGM, M/E1 PST, M/E2 PGM, M/E2 PST and so-on...

(its just a secret code to keep people in the dark you know... )