Regional opt curiosities

Ever wanted to see all the regions during a single news headline opt? What do you mean no.


(Video from Julian Farmer’s channel)

While away over in the west this week I noticed the regional presenter gets name checked before the national, is that common elsewhere? In the south east we always have it the other way around (which feels the right way around to me).

A bit of creativity too from wherever is top left by zooming into the plasma showing the titles.

In Scotland, it's the national then regional. Would definitely sound a bit odd for to be the other way round.

I like how BBC East zooms in towards the plasma while the titles start. Reporting Scotland usually goes back to Network when the titles have already started.

I can’t see Look North Yorkshire in that.

Top Left is Look East Cambridge, Janine Machin is the presenter. Zooming into the plasma, for a few years I think now, maximising the opt out time.

When you enter the gates of TV pres hell, you are greeted with:
"This is BBC One in the <region>" x100

In all seriousness, quite interesting to see the differences between each region and as said before the Look East Cambridge is quite clever.

I know it’s now the UK opt, but here are various “opts” or cut ins as they’re called for weather during Today.







Here someone had to have used a media monitoring service, these forecasts are rarely if never online and they never include the toss.

The Look East Norwich doesn't seem to follow what has been the pattern latterly. They usually use the screen on the opposite side of the studio.

Norwich were branding this bulletin as Look East Late (as a few others might have been) whilst Cambridge had been unchanged.

First Today video, second screen in. After the cut back to Today you start on a three-shot, then that camera angle changes, but on that second monitor first before the others. Then after that everything is in sync.

The hell is that about?

Looks like an encoding error on that video, because the shot is frozen when it first appears.

How do you record multiple sources at the same time, that’s quite clever!

Look East Cambridge I would say are one of the regions that have adopted to the more creative style of BBC News bulletins since the move to NBH. They don't always get it right, and even though they still have an N6 style set, they've had a desk vaguely in-keeping with the Studio E desk (except lit in red installed), and use a nice mix of shots from different presentation areas, even getting rid of the main desk to be replaced by a coffee table by one-on-one studio interviews. Despite one of the points in the report from when they moved to their current base being about there being no camera operators in the studio, they also are back to using a camera op at 6:30 and 10:30.

However, one has to wonder how much this is is do with the fact that Cambridge have modern kit? Look East Norwich is trying to do something different with their late bulletins (which are referred to as Look East Late), but as they have a small studio, no camera ops and old kit it often doesn't look great. Then again, there's also the case in Norwich of the titles which they've tweaked and changed (using the wrong font) so many times that someone has used the 'Clone stamp' tool in Photoshop to cover something up rather than go back to the template and redo the whole sequence, which is just lazy and shouldn't appear on air!

Just worked out that's from 24th October 2017... as I can just about hear myself in that audio mix saying "... Northern Ireland" and "Belfast".