BBC ONE English Regions on DSAT

How does it all work? I just thought the regions opted out at 6:30 on analogue. Are they still opting out from a "national" version of BBC 1, or are they entire channels. Seeing East Midlands Today in 16:9 is pretty cool, picture quality is great compared to the normal poor analogue picture.

I think they are taking the DTT feeds.

The 'Fake Bars' only appear on the analogue version of the regional news programmes - the digital versions loose the same area of the picture when converted to widescreen.

Also apart from the 4 newest regional centres the programmes are made in PAL with analogue Beta tape and then converted to digital, hence they the picture quality isn't so good.

All the regional centres are being converted to new all-digital, modern, server-based equipment - Nottingham, London, South East and presumably Hull have already converted - the rest will be done soon starting with Norwich which apparently will move to the new building next Saturday.

Any opinion on the new regional shows you've seen?

The feed being sent to the satellite is the same as the one that goes to the DTT transmitter. Thus each region is on air 24 hours a day just like its terrestrial counterpart .

Thanks for the explanation Larry. Well I caught a bit of the Hull show tonight and you lot weren't joking when you said shoebox. Talk about cramped in! They need a wide lens like national news has

Still, fair play for getting all this up and running. Wonder whether Autumn was just an 'absolute latest' date for the switch on. Still doesn't explain Nations though and whether non-England viewers will get to see the other regions before that magic 10th July date. I mean, will the rest see the listings on the EPG while still not being able to see the programmes?

Bristol also edit and transmit from Profile servers (using Lightworks VIP for editing?) I believe - though they still have a 4:3 PAL analogue gallery and studio infrastructure. I think that Southampton also have Profile servers for transmission - though they may well edit to Beta SP or Avid.

Many English regions do now shoot on DVCam rather than Beta SP - but most will still edit TO Beta SP. (Analogue SP is a much better "editors" format than DVCam...)

There speaks someone who has no idea...

Backhauling 22 regional feeds to London (and presumably ensuring the correct subtitles and aspect ratio switching comes with them), and muxing them for uplink is a damn site more difficult than booking a single vision circuit to a third party uplink provider.

As others have stated - it seems likely that the feeds being backhauled to London over ATM are fixed rate MPEG2 derived in the region, not sure if this is the same MPEG2 encoder used to derive the fixed rate DTT service, or a separate encoder fed from the SDI digital baseband (i.e. uncompressed) output of the opt-switch... The latter would be more expensive, but allow DTT and DSat feeds to run at different data rates.

Absolutely great to be able to watch Look East in London though!

Absolutely right. We've also got a few Fast Purple stations, which we edit "PDP" pieces on (ie, the ones the reporters have gone out and shot)

We also use Fast Purple to edit Inside Out, rather than tying up an edit suite.

You're not kidding me.



I'll see if I can find out on Monday how they're doing it ... I would imagine, considering the speed they've done this in, it could be the DTT feeds - but don't quote me on that.

Why are these so-called tests still encrypted then?

Honestly? I haven't a clue ... I would imagine they'll unencrypt them next week at some point, surely?