"Off air recordings" and A, B and C rolls

I think it's 48 days now, and that applies to radio stations too.

Ofcom take it quite seriously, radio stations have been fined in the past when there's been a complaint and the station haven't been able to produce an ROT.

There was one station in Oxford a few years ago that tried to get round this problem by doing the same breakfast show from the day concerned a week later - timechecking the wrong day and doing the news from the week before. They didn't get away with it


I believe the BBC keeps copies of it's ROT indefinitely, not just for the 48 days. Originally on VHS but now digitally. Although they have lots of uses, as Noggin mentioned on the other thread, they are sometimes used to validate witness statements in court cases

And there's also an 'A-B Roll' which is an old editing term for when you're editing using two source tapes, usually because you're doing a transition between them

... and film too. A cheap way of being able to mix being two film items without going to the expense of having a new print made.

We used to use Revox reel to reel tape recorders running at 1.7/8 ips and then subsequently Racal audio data recorders that used a sort of large cassette. We recorded transmission audio out on one track, and a mix of transmission gallery talkback and 'TIM' on the other. No pictures and not much quality.

I guess that depends on the link quality between Chiswick and Fountain/Wembley? If it's a compressed link, then you ideally would not want to bake in compression artefacts to a broadcast quality PasB, so would record at Fountain/Wembley rather than Chiswick? Also it's probably easier for the production team to access if made on-site, as one use of the PasB will be for highlights packages, along with on-site ISOs.

Of course Chiswick may also make a copy for repeat purposes.

The fibre transmission paths are all HD-SDI at 1.485 GB/s (at least from The London Studios). I believe Fountain initially used their SD lines (STM-1 SDH fibres) to send HD picture compressed as JPEG2000/Dirac - even then, the bitrate of these would likely exceed tape compression recording (HDCAM etc.) Nowadays, EVS will record in ProRes/DNxHD - again more than sufficient for PasB.

I don't think Ericsson/Chiswick are liable to record individual programmes -just the main channel output as an off-air feed. The programme producer is responsible for providing a copy of the live programme for archive/on demand.

Rather than a legal reason, maybe a requirement by the studio facility when it hires out its space? Was just a thought.

Or useful when making compilation programmes. Every second of output of BBC Radio Five Live exists since 5am on launch day in March 1994. There was a interview with Jonathan Wall the controller of Five Live around the 20th anniversary this year, who said having access to everything in digital format made making the 20 year retrospective very easy indeed.

There needs to be a copy of the 'Programme as Transmitted (broadcast)' which is not the same as the programme as it left the studio for regulatory/legal purposes. Imagine you're sat at home at you hear the word 'f**k' randomly in the middle of some middle of the road live LE programme. Say you then complain to Ofcom and they investigate. The producer of the programme will likely say words to the effect 'there was absolutely no use of the word 'f**k' at any point in our programme. None. But the PasT will show the word was present.

So was it a technical fault somewhere in the transmission path? a momentary audio crosspoint failure? an inadvertent press of a button. Ofcom will investigate and in this hypothetical scenario would certainly ask for the PasT recording and a copy of the studio output - if it exists, there is no requirement to record this.

So you can see, I hope, that you need a copy of what actually went to air, not what left the studio - one may be perfectly fine, the other may not be for all manner of reasons. And of course you don't need to separately record each and every programme as a separate item, a continuous recording would be fine.

I'm sure Chiswick would make a copy for the production company if they wanted one, but they will charge you for it because they used to charge for everything that isn't covered in their contract with ITV.

Probably not that easy, it's a great resource to have the entire output of a station like that but unless it's got good metadata it's difficult to find highlights. From what ive seen the 5 Live archive doesn't. So things like 9/11 or Dianas death are easy but a great that great phone call that Nicky Cambell did in September... or was it November 2003 is tricky.

I don't know the specifics of Ofcom rules for television, but for radio the rules regarding the recording of programmes as transmitted basically means recording the entire station output as transmitted 24/7, not just specific programmes or clean feeds (i.e. studio output without ads). For example at the station I work at we record from the output of the last bit of equipment in our broadcast chain (the audio processor), which is what is also encoded for transmission. I know of many stations which go one step further and record what they receive from the transmitter, so that they also have any transmission faults that occur. As stated earlier Ofcom require these to be kept for 48 days, although I think its fair to say most stations keep them for much longer if not forever.

Assuming the rules are similar for television (correct me if I'm wrong), ITV would record 24/7 the entire output of each of the ITV regions (and the other ITV channels). This would happen either at the playout centres (Chiswick and Leeds) by feeding their TX output into the recording server, or by recording off air as received from a transmitter/satellite, which I suspect would also be recorded at the playout centres but could take place anywhere in practice.

Recording off air is particularly useful for the station to prove that commercials did/didn't make it to air.