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

The current rules are:

"Recordings of radio programmes must be kept by broadcasters for 42 days after the broadcast. Recordings of television programmes must be kept by cable and satellite broadcasters for 60 days, and by BBC1, BBC2, ITV, STV, UTV, Channel 4, Channel 5, S4C and digital terrestrial television channels for 90 days. "

As lifted from the latest information publically available from Ofcom.

As part of my first job in presentation we had to change the tapes in the RoT machines when on night shifts. They were domestic VHS decks ISTR and we had a stock of tapes which meant we had more than enough for three months of recordings. We'd take the next 3 tapes on the shelf (I think they were E240s recording half speed, so 8 hours each) rewind them and scribble out the date on the label. When we'd got to the last tape on the shelf, we'd go back to the beginning. Pretty low tech really. I've a feeling there were other places in the BBC that also made RoT recordings, possibly in a higher quality - perhaps at Windmill Road?

We also used to record all the junctions, along with network director talkback. When the red lights in the tx area flashed at 2 minutes to a junction, these recorders (also domestic VHS) would drop into record and they'd stop when the red lights went off. ISTR the vision output was also superimposed with a load of text generated by the automation and vision mixer to say precisely what was going on at the time. Very handy if you'd just had a breakdown and needed to log it and/or try and work out what went wrong.

Yes, the ones at Windmill Road were supposedly the 'legal' ones. Which was a good job as the ones in Pres were often forgotten.

I think they were E180s on LP, that gave you 6 hours a tape, 4 tapes a day


I've known LP VHS to be the ROT method of choice for radio stations too as it gave them 6 hours of good quality audio recording.

It certainly was at an RSL I was involved with. I've heard of some stations plugging a camcorder pointing at a clock into the VHS recorder to give a time reference. Would have made finding clips for the compilation package I made for the last day a lot easier if we'd done that!

That's pretty common I think, one of my old colleagues did it for the Preston Guild RSL in 1992.

I would love to see some of that, could you upload it somewhere?

That's interesting, do they burn them off the CD/DVD or some other format for long term storage? As I can't imagine hard drives (when switched on 24/7) will last indefintitely...

Certainly when I did radio, we kept for a minimum for 42 days at least, it was recorded from the post-compressor output. They used VHS to begin with and moved to a digital system that would capture the output as an MP3 and you could search by date.

Isn't there another meaning to "A" and "B" rolls, in relation to film production on 16mm?

With 35mm the stock is sturdy enough to be able to cement a splice in the gap between two frames. 16mm would be too small for this to occur without the splice disturbing part of the image, so the cut negatives were assembled onto two reels. These had shots interspersed with blank where the active image was on the other roll.

I've no idea if they make actual physical copies of output any more, I suspect not. Digital storage is so cheap that I'd have thought that it will all just be held on server. Physical formats like CD and DVD aren't as useful long term, not only do they degrade but also they go obsolete. Hard drives don't last but that's why RAIDs and similar exist... and of course when better, newer or bigger storage is needed the data can be just moved across.


There are at least couple of internal systems that enable staff to access past output - the older one AutoROT (on the BBC's intranet) has been available since the early 2000's, initially it held a month or so of radio but now keeps them indefinitely and some stations like Radio 4 have years of output available. I believe there is another similar system that the radio stations use which records in better quality so that clips can be reused on-air.

Then there's BBC Redux which has BBC TV and radio output from 2007 onwards. It records off air, splitting up the MPEG transport streams that are sent for transmission, so unlike old style 'off air' recordings they're of a good quality.

Yes. BBC Redux has effectively replaced VHS and DVD off-air recordings within the BBC for research purposes. The transport stream recordings are effectively lossless off-air recordings, so like Freeview+ and Sky+ recordings, they are like watching the live broadcast. In addition BBC Redux also has "Snippets" which takes the subtitles of the programme and makes it searchable. An incredibly powerful tool in some situations.

Similarly AutoROT has Aurix voice recognition, allowing keyword searching of radio programmes. Again incredibly useful in some situations.

LTO tape makes this fairly cheap and easy to do. You can store around 3TB on a cartridge that costs under £20: http://www.misco.co.uk/product/Q244448/HP-Ultrium-LTO5-3TB-Data-Cartridge

I believe most post houses in Soho use these to archive finished masters of programmes. We certainly use them at TLS.
Just like any medium, stored correctly they can last a fairly long time. Given their compact size, they're relatively easy to store in bulk too.

I guess cloud-based storage, redundant SANs etc. are slowly encroaching this territory though.

Indeed - when I was at the World Service 24 hour news 'stream' (which regions / partner stations opted in and out of) was archived to CDR from about 2000 onwards. Unfortunately a few years later they found that either the disks themselves (or possibly the glue used in some of the labels) had caused them to become unreadable. Some of what couldn't be read was rather historic / important, fortunately some of it was kept elsewhere so could be rescued. Much of it is now available internally. As Inspector Sands said AutoROT now goes back to 2004 for World Service News and to 2006 for Radio 4. There is another system that has all the radio networks going back to 2008 in compressed WAV.


5 Live used to be archived on to E240 video tapes on LP- sometimes you'd see them around the production desks at TVC- meaning its fairly unique in that the entire output since the station began has been archived. They recently finished digitising them and they are now all available internally. A good way to fill a quiet shift is to pick a news or sports event since 1994 and listen to how it was reported / covered at the time. Unfortunately some of the key moments are missing - you find an eight hour gap in the archive - presumably because that tape was 'popular' and got lost or degraded. I did read there were some partial copies of what is missing elsewhere which will be used to fill in some of the gaps.