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The 1988 News at Ten titles

How were they made? (June 2016)

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RI
Richard
I can't imagine ITN could tie their vision mixer, a DVE, and a caption generator to timecode from a VT replay of a blurred set of titles to render a set of clock hands. Not in 1988 anyway. I stand to be corrected of course but I'd have thought a selection of titles with clock hands at 00, 01, 02 etc would be far more likely, with the gallery choosing the one most appropriate.


That does make the most sense, although I seem to remember reading or hearing sonewhere that they used the machine which was normally used to generate live football scores on a Saturday to do the hands. Now I may have imagined this, or the source may have been dodgy.

In a related ore, during World Cup '94, the next set of titles were in use and the News was delayed until 11:15. By that time they used a real recording of the Houses of Parliament and the clock rather than CGI. On this occasion, they filmed a new shot of the clock showing 11:15, although it was from ground level rather than above. There were no references to News at Ten and any graphics with "News at Ten" on them were reedited.

A few years later the news was late again but they just called it News at Ten and used the normal titles.
NG
noggin Founding member
I can't imagine ITN could tie their vision mixer, a DVE, and a caption generator to timecode from a VT replay of a blurred set of titles to render a set of clock hands. Not in 1988 anyway. I stand to be corrected of course but I'd have thought a selection of titles with clock hands at 00, 01, 02 etc would be far more likely, with the gallery choosing the one most appropriate.


The BBC did just that a few years later with the CRV + Charisma integration (you probably didn't need to do it in the VM) for the 'Not VR' cut glass news look though, and ITN always had a pretty impressive graphics department. Not that I'm saying that IS how they did it (and it could have been pre-recorded earlier) - just that the tech the BBC used in 1993 wasn't unavailable in 1988. (Though the person who made it work - much missed - was at the BBC)

However ITN may well have had a Harry by then - and it would have been very simple to have fixed the hands that way, assuming they hadn't just rendered off various time variants.

Worth noting that Channel Four News used to render their headlines/titles on a Quantel Harry suite (which was the Harry Disc recorder, Encore DVE and Paintbox - or if you were really posh a Mirage) to get the nice bevelled glass edges on the wipes - not something the BBC would have considered doing. (I'm not sure that BBC News ever had a Harry...)
Last edited by noggin on 19 June 2016 7:40pm - 3 times in total

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