RTÉ News

It is still common to here members of my family called RTE Radio, Radio Eireann, and the RTE one, Telefís Éireann. Thought the republic is also still called the free State.

Just reading - all ads and weather started broadcasting in 16:9 on the Sky platform on Tuesday the 24th. So it was then that weather first broadcast in widescreen rather than today (or 14:9 on analogue of course)

Saw the floating DOG pickle104 on Nine! Looks woeful, but as Phen says they could be preparing for alternative formats. The weather is already suffering though from the problem you mention of the DOG stretching too far into the shot

Here's an interesting link to a list of widescreen questions e-mailed to RTÉ that have been answered (well most!)

http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=220629

I'm from Tyrone and people call the Republic 'the free state' all the time.

As far as I can tell, the sting for the late evening headlines on RTÉ One last night was in widescreen. Its very similar to the current one but the green bar at the side stretches further into the screen and it makes the blue 'RTÉ News' bar look smaller. I taped it but i don't have any way to capture it... The RTÉ News logo on the lunchtime news today was back to normal (ie: not floating).

Yes I saw this evening. Rather bizzarely as you say the stings are being broadcast in widescreen (presumably generated by Presentation) but the bulletin itself in 4:3!
On analogue there's a slight flick from the 14:9 mode of the sting to 4:3 compressed just before the studio signal comes through so it must be widescreen on Sky, but converts to 4:3 for studio.
The green bar on the graphics must look rather strange so far in shot in 16:9...

Yes, the stings generated by Presentation are in 16:9. I must say, I'd be absolutely disgusted if RTE simply revised the news set slightly in the Autumn to cater for 16:9. RTE News needs a dramatic overhaul. I cannot sress this enough. The look and feel of the service is light years behind its UK and European equivalents - very very stale. Most of the presenters are quite stuffy too - Bryan Dobson being one of the few exceptions.

The last relaunch of the service, if anything, was a few steps backwards.

As someone commented here previously, it was quite nice to see Bryan and Mark presenting from BBC studios in London during General Election Night. What a difference it made to be surrounded by professional gear/sets.

Wasn't it - the difference was marked. With Bryan standing there beside that fancy monitor, he looked like a proper telly person , i.e. not a professional stifling in amateurish conditions. Mark looked equally well in such polished surroundings - though as said the vision mixing was pretty stodgy, no doubt a staffer hauled over from Montrose.

Yes the Newsroom requires a total overhaul, but it's something that needs to be done on a large-scale basis, including broom-cupboard bulletins, Prime Time, Q&A and The Week in Politics.
Personally I think Prime Time is the production that is really leading the need for change - I cannot get over how little comment if any there has been anywhere about its production values.
It is without doubt the worst presented current affairs studio production in these islands, if not Western Europe.

From sets which are utterly abominable in form, materials and colour and which change from day to day, to guest layout around desks, to often appalling vision mixing, lighting and camerawork including terrible composition (cheek-dominated shots, no looking room etc) and unambitous opening and closing movement, as well as amateurish astons and gaudy graphics.
And as for maintenence! The state of the studio floor and the surfaces of some of the desks - appalling! Not to mention that some of the desks are just exposed steel frames fitted with sheets of manky plastic
It is an appallingly cheap and unprofessional production through and through, with the exception of course of its other side - excellent reporting, presenting & anaylsis.

Precisely the same with Q&A, though it has better camerawork - anyone see it on Monday? I have never in my life seen such appalling lighting - a first year in a media cert could do better than that.

And as for the Newsroom - Eileen Dunne was completely over-exposed for the whole bulletin the other night. Whatever one may say of the harsh lighting of the newsroom, the camera operator also has a role to play. Rougly one in four main bulletins are over-exposed on average - it just beggars belief they can get away with this sort of nonsense.
And other elements like a big harsh shadow on the wall behind the sportsreader occasionally on Six One, not to mention how close the sportsreaders are to the wall, creating a cramped and unprofessional look - likewise whenever guests are seated over on the other side, mushed in between the set and the wall, it's like a group of friends all packed into a friend's bedroom!
Also the wall is so close that a blemish in the cyclorama that has been there since day one is always in focus.

The design of the set has been gone through here before, but yes it needs to go. I don't think the cream wall element is necessarily too bad, only cause I like nice clean chunky lines , but overall it looks very cheap and poorly designed, especially the desk - what a ridiculous concoction. Also the amount of joins and cracks etc in the walls and towards the floor are clumsy.

And to round off the rant, yes many of the newsreaders are very stuffy, notably Eileen Dunne who'd send you to sleep. Don't like saying that cause she's a true professional but God she's as predicatable as the day is long. Likewise Ken Hammond, despite having a perfect voice and demeanour, really isn't great either. He rattles off the autocue like he can't get rid of it quick enough, and he is by far the worst interviewer in the world. He just cannot deliver his scripted questions without sounding as contrived and stilted as Nuala Carey on the weather

Anthony Murnane now - there's a man to take over from Anne Doyle when she goes.

Here here to all of that! Couldn't have said it better myself. I hope somebody up in Montrose takes note!

The most irritating thing about that cheap tacky thrown-together newsroom has to be the scruff marks on the floor and the smears on the desk - and just a few days ago I saw a big black set of paw-prints (human paw-prints that is) on the cream wall behind the sports presenter . Well if we're not to get a revamp soon, lets hope that they can at least manage to pay a new cleaner out of the €6 million profit they made this year. Actually, considering prices in Dublin, €6 million might not be enough...

And with reference to the sting in 16:9, that to me suggests that they are not going to bother to change the current look in autumn. Why would they bother to alter the sting (and presumably the rest of their presentation) if they were going to change it soon anyway?

I'd tend to agree. I doubt it will be changed in the autumn, though that RTÉ e-mail did say they were adapting some sets...
Considering no sets really need to be tweaked at all considering most if not all have pretty generic backgrounds, I'm not sure what they're talking about...
Indeed the only set that needs to be tweaked is the Newsroom, where shot content is very precise!

Were it not for that comment throwing the cat amongst the pigeons I'd say there's at least a year if not 18 months to go on that set by RTÉ's standards. Indeed the changeover from the 2000 set to the current one took nearly four years, though that was during the dark ages of pre-licence increase...



lol - just typical

Yes the scuffmarks are the worst element of the new set, and considering it is so dominant in the opening shots (way too dominant by all accounts) it's a wonder why it's not cleaned enough.
Just thought - no doubt this is why some camera ops/directors chose the wide shot with the floor largely absent - you can just see the director calling "let's get it tighter on two, the cleaner didn't come in this morning"

And considering the newsreaders genrally wear 'proper' clothes, it must be the flippin technical crew causing the mess!
If the set is just tweaked for 16:9 rather than replaced, they'd do well to put a decent carpet down on the floor - the moving pedestal camera should be able to roll over it.

Eileen Wheelan was very very bright on Six One this evening. In that blue jacket and with another light on her, we'd have been 'watching Six One, with Bryan Dobson and the Virgin Mary'

Here's a rather interesting technical error I've never seen happen before this evening on Nine - look at Eileen's left arm there...

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/RTE1TV/NewsTonight.jpg

How is the image only generated for the hole area in the wooden unit?

Yes that shape on her arm is very mysterious. I don't like that 'image in the hole' idea. It looks cheap (well maybe they want it to look cheap so it will blend in with the rest of the set) and you can see the reflection on the desk where there's no image reflected. It really does look so dated. And what's the deal with the dark areas to the bottom right of the image?

I think a screen like the ones they use on N24 would be much nicer and I imagine would be easier to use. Even if they were to use something like the one they already have in the newsroom, it would be an improvement.

Those dark areas at the edges of the image are always there, and usually most of the way round too. I assume they're put in to blend the picture with the 'reality' of the set.
Those images are often shimmering around the edges too in a very unprofessional way.
But just to analyse that shot - there's a few things in this alone that are wrong or at best clumsy.

1. Obviously the image overlapping onto her arm.
2. The RTÉ News DOG is missing.
3. There's a shimmering distraction to the top left of the generated image.
4. Nasty hard shadow to Eileen's right shoulder from key light.

Nit-picky points perhaps, but these are all magnified when viewed on a 21" or larger screen. Seeing these samll pics here, or the viewer watching on a portable in the kitchen doesn't see half of what's going on.

Some images here of the Single Operator Control Room output for Friday's late night bulletin. Here's that ghastly line at the bottom of the screen mentioned before - absolutely nothing to do with aspect ratios, just the image being outputed is woefully unstable or mis-alligned or whatever you want to call it. This has not been fixed in the many months/years that it has been in operation.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/RTE1TV/KenHammond.jpg

The lighting is better than usual there.
And as for the astons and report DOGs

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/RTE1TV/LateNewsMultipic.jpg

Again not too apparent in these small pics but the colouring of both is off the wall, the aston upper and lower bars aren't even aligned, the text font used is awful, and the DOGs do not even remotely match the standard version. Here's a like-for-like comparision:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/RTE1TV/DOG.jpg

And the astons pictured are the better ones - there are some real gems like titles not fitting onto the bar so letters or parts of words are just chopped off for convenience, or others where words have huge gaps between them as if just thrown at random onto the bars etc.

It really beggars belief that this is the output of a national broadcaster - a student television station can output better stuff than this, and that is no joke. The fact that TV3's main bulletins are better than RTÉ's in production values is perhaps the most damning of all.

Indeed in general I think the astons are appalling, not just from the SOCR. They lack any identity at all - the white is as obscure as anything, and combined with generic newsy blue, they could be the output of any station in the world, whatever about the fact that the font used is crude and overall they look very amateurish.

The only saving grace of this whole presentaion package really is the graphics which look quite smart - nice clean and modern, but using classic colours. Perhaps the intro is a bit bland or empty visually, but by and large I think it and the music work well:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/RTE1TV/NineOClockGraphic3.jpg

Note Presentation left the DOG up over the graphics - they're always going this...

It's so good to hear someone else express the same views that I hold on RTE presentation and getting into the same kind of depth and detail!!

It is nothing short of disgraceful that in 2005, virtually all daytime bulletins on RTE ONE are coming either from the small news set in Presentation or the small SO set-up.

The 10am-ish bulletins will come from Presentation: there's no real aston capability here (only DOG) and they don't play out reports during these bulletins either. The set is *very* small and the newscaster is so close to the background image (which is real) that you often see their shadow.

Then, from about 11-11.30am, we move to the SO studio. The background here is CSO, with a DOG burnt on to the background image. From here we do get reports; however, no permanent DOG - it fades in and out with the name astons and, as you say, is nowhere near the same proportions/colour of the proper DOG. The astons are, yes, a bit of a mess too. The Pres-based and SO bulletins are very very amateurish.

TV 3 is streets ahead. If RTE don't want to turn on the lights in their main studio during the day then do what TV 3 do for short bulletins: present visuals on a story accompanied by graphic and voiceover. No need for studio - and much more professional result. Or, resort back to their early 1990s solution, which had the newscaster present from the newsroom.

The main TV 3 studio - although a few years old now - *still* looks so much better than the RTE effort...and their astons just leave RTE way behind.

The picture inset on the RTE Nine O'Clock News is truly embarrassing. It's on a par with BBC bulletins from the 70s for goodness sake. And as for the rough edges around the image THIS IS 2005 GUYS - COME ON!!!!

...and yes, the most dreadful part of all, the reflection of the real set on the desk. How pathetic is that!!

What was that announcement last week - 6 million Euro operating profit last year. RTE, let's see a decent proportion of this money invested in decent set design/materials and graphics for your key output. Get some fresh talent in and replace most of those stale, staid old cardboard cut-out presenters.

Get rid of the 'strategic thinker' management types and their ludicrous and unjustifiable salaries. Get that money redirected into infrastructure. Why do you think you have to chop and change your sets and graphics every two years? Answer: because you go for cheap cheap cheap...and it dates and looks stale so quickly.