It just amazes me the amount of cock-ups that happen in just ONE DAY. I only saw a few minutes of the nine tonight but in those few minutes, near the end of a report, we just randomly faded to Eileen staring at her monitor for a few seconds with the sound from the report still playing albeit gradually fading away. Then she carried on as if nout had happened.
Then on News on Two (again I only saw the tail end of it), when they cut to the shot of both news reader and sports presenter before the sports news, Joe Stack was caught completely off guard and could be seen looking down into the desk apparently checking himself in the reflection from the glass on top of it. He then suddenly sprung up once he realised that he was in-vision.
And then at the end of the bulletin where they use the wierd shot from the opposite end of the desk with the squishy-vision plasma behind the presenter, the plasma suddenly cut to what the camera was seeing ie: you had that infinity effect like pointing a camera at a TV thats already showing what the camera's showing. They then faded back to the Lotto results, of all things!
Do they just pick random people off the street 5 mins before the start of the bulletin and ask them to be directors/vision mixers/camera operators? I dont think so because you'd have a better result than what we get now!
Yes, I saw Nine too. For whatever reason for a major report, it seems the vision mixer thought there was no closing 'Barry Cummins, RTÉ News, Dublin' , and so cut early to Eileen . At least she was prepared.
Typical incident for News on Two too.
And not only that, yesterday on News on Two the final report had no sound! They were forced to cut back to poor Eileen Wheelan, who apologised and said we'll just have to leave it there then - goodnight!
A
very
messy One O'Clock bulletin today...during the start of a report about East Timor, they started showing footage of the Pope and something called 'Eurovision News'...and then after the report about the hammer-head shark more problems. Scroll to about 13:19 and let it play until the business news.
Good grief!! I can hardly believe that the 'Eurovision News' menu was left on air for so long.
This is all so terribly far beyond a joke at this stage. Can you imagine the shambles that any rolling RTE News channel would be?
You really have to ask what the hell is going on within the TV news division that the quality of programmes has been allowed to deteriorate like this. I know that if I were a TV news presenter on there I'd be absolutely hopping mad with the output from that gallery in recent months.
THIS IS PATHETIC, RTE - FOR GOODNESS SAKE PLEASE GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!!
This is UNBELIEVABLE!!! What a disaster after disaster! AND, not only do you have all the farcial messing about that Phen mentions, including VTs going down, autocue fecking up, a lingering aston, a gibbering Finnerty the poor man, the Eurovision story feeds, but look at the opening headlines VT too - there's no images for the main story, and then the second story is miscued!
And not only
that
, look at John's messed up link at 2.31 caused by director intervening, followed by the dodgiest of camera operation and appalling sound operation by Ciarán Mullooly! It looks like a student television station!
It's strange for all of Finnerty's professionalism, he just cannot handle director instructions via talkback - indeed most men cannnot, very much a female multitasking skill!
I remember during the London bombings coverage, he acted similarly: stopping to listen to what the director had to say, and then apologising afterwards.
And not only THAT, scroll to 11.14 to see the most disasterous camera operation!!! And then look at the report cue! This is unreal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Talk about car crash television - what the HELL IS GOING ON IN THAT PLACE?????!!!!!
The Eurovision menu is what's shown on a feed when there's nothing coming through. Interesting to note that the time on the menu was from 8 that morning, so it had somehow managed to get into the system or even into the report.
However I'd be inclined to think it's a technical problem with playout that caused the whole set of messups, or even a routing one, but the mis-cues could also have been attributed to this. I know RTE has a fair few mess ups but I can see this one being entirely technical based. For example, the link where Brian stopped to take a direction, the direction could have been the VT had failed so he paused.
The dodgy camera however, well... doubt that was caused by technical errors
They are indeed nearly all technical playout problems, including the missed cues and various director instructions. However what is inexcusable here is the fact that RTÉ News's playout systems are notoriously unreliable; they break down at a completely unacceptable rate - once every few months usually. But not only this, all regular viewers of their output will note the constant intrusion during reports of pixelating, or momentary jamming/freezing, or lines stuttering across the screen, or crackling audio etc etc - all the effects one might associate with a dodgy VHS cassette passing through dirty heads. It's unbelieveable the rate at which these blemishes occur, often a few times a week!
Thursday's problems were simply part of this wider problem RTÉ News has with its gallery operations, and report playout in particular.
It's interesting that Finnerty mentioned problems with 'our computers', perhaps suggesting that they do actually use harddisk playout in RTÉ, and the director had just told him they were having a problem with the system, but on the other hand the often dodgy quality of playout mentioned above, as well as their notoriously tight report start cues directly after the presenter links, would lead one to believe they still use a VT-based system...
They are indeed nearly all technical playout problems, including the missed cues and various director instructions. However what is inexcusable here is the fact that RTÉ News's playout systems are notoriously unreliable; they break down at a completely unacceptable rate - once every few months usually. But not only this, all regular viewers of their output will note the constant intrusion during reports of pixelating, or momentary jamming/freezing, or lines stuttering across the screen, or crackling audio etc etc - all the effects one might associate with a dodgy VHS cassette passing through dirty heads. It's unbelieveable the rate at which these blemishes occur, often a few times a week!
If it's grey lines and it looks like VHS then it's BetaSP they're still running off, and probably the machines are as old as the format themselves! Digital breakup means they've finally gone digital but I doubt it.
It surprises me that things like that aren't fixed. Perhaps they've made an investment of such that will allow the changeover to happen and that's why they're not bothering to repair it, but then again who knows.
It's hard to believe that any production team(s) can be allowed to be consistently as poor as this. One wonders is there something more to this?
There are definite issues with equipment, yes. Is it possible though that the issues are being deliberately exaggerated in order to provoke a response from certain dept(s) within RTE. Something along the lines of 'give us the cash to buy some decent kit...this is the best we can deliver with this rubbish'.
This is 2006 and the technical quality of video reports on RTE News doesn't even come near where the BBC and others were at over ten years ago. When they obtain footage from another broadcaster, it looks as though it has been recorded on VHS - poor resolution, poor colour and contrast. That's actually one thing that really irritates me - why is the contrast on many of their reports so poor? When they prepare their own graphics, the colour and contrast is usually very poor too. I haven't seen one for a while but whenever reports are filed from Belfast/N Ireland, the quality of the video is usually rubbish.
Telefís you're absolutely spot on with those observations. I actually put down the freezing and crackling to my dish until I saw the same thing on analogue.
I know this isnt the place for it but does anyone have an idea of where I could get the theme tunes for RTE Radio One News [current and the previous], The One O'Clock News on radio one and 5-7 Live...all clean and in mp3
I saw a nice special ident used on RTÉ One tonight before one of the 'Time of Our Lives' series. It started off with the windmills ident from the current package then faded into the brown 1980's ident, then the early 90's stone ident, then the lovely 1995 blue ident, then an ident from the last package (I think) and then to the 'Time of Our Lives' endboard. I've never seen a special ident like this used by RTÉ before but it was very nice indeed.
Indeed, though they've been using it all week Phen as part of the '86 - '06 Time of Our Lives? series - before each of these special programmes.
The next time it will be aired should be before Nationwide at 19.00 tomorrow (Friday).
The older idents are mercilessly cropped to 16:9, but sure there's nothing they can do about that. Also seem to be being played off a VT rather than the standard ident harddisk player.
RTÉ's 'Test the Nation' on Monday ought to be most interesting - see how the production values compare to the BBC. Of particular interest is that this was clearly scheduled to coincide with the ending of The Late Late Show, so Studio 4 would be free to use!
It's going to be quite a challenge to arrange the tiered seating at RTÉ in the six blocks that the BBC use in Studio 1 at Television Centre - not sure Studio 4 is big enough to circle them round like that. There isn't much depth for tiered seating to face each other - so much so I wonder if they'd contemplate using the sound stage that was used for Who Wants To Be A Millionare?
Also going to require a big set investment, so we're definitely going to see more episodes/versions of the show in the future.
. At least she was prepared.
