BBC South East Today

AS

Asa Admin 5 September 2001 6:32am

Bit of a cockup on the 3.25 bulletin - Laurie was looking at the wrong camera for quite a while but I got the impression that it was because the autocue on the camera we were seeing, wasn't working. The timing on that bulletin was a little loose.

And as Lee correctly prophesised, we saw Gillian in the NRSE studio for about a second during the 1st report!

Cheers, Asa

MA

mark Founding member 5 September 2001 7:22am

Any chance of some screengrabs of Laurie in the new studio?

By the way, is it me or are they using the same background image as South Today (from Southampton)? If so, why?!

IH

I Hate HTV West 5 September 2001 8:34am

Marcus posted:

William posted:

Quote:

The other main error was the astons coming up at the wrong time in the package about the birth in tv. Again they must have run that one through the system a few times.

So would I be right in thinking that for each report, the appropriate astons are tagged to appear when the timecode reaches a certain point, rather than someone in the gallery shouting out cues like they used to?

The other minor mistake I noticed was when a piece of VT (eurotunnel spokesman) finished it immediately went into freeze-frame, but they didn't cut back to the studio for a couple of seconds. �I presume that also freezes automatically..

William

Yes to both queries.

Aston's are automatically put on air by a computer at a certain time into each report. If the journo who typed the details gets it wrong, up they come at the wrong time. News24 and World work in the same way.

At least with a human vision mixer they would look at the output before puting up the astons.

Also with digital systems most items freeze at the end rather than running to black as they used to do with tape. I also noticed they didn't have a live bug on the end of that report. Maybe they forgot in all the hassle.

One more thing that went wrong was the autoprompt failed for one link. Laurrie, like a true profesional, read from his script. Have you seen the outtake of Jon Snow when the autoprompt failed. It was painful.

Not nessasarily - some places (including Points West) still fade the astons up and down manually. Some places (inc News 24 and SEtoday) have a system called Big Ted that does it for them.

NG

noggin Founding member 5 September 2001 9:40am

Quote:

Not nessasarily - some places (including Points West) still fade the astons up and down manually. �Some places (inc News 24 and SEtoday) have a system called Big Ted that does it for them.

Sorry - that is not correct.

Columbus controls the vision mixer and cues and puts astons to air on 'VTs' for News 24 (and judging by reports SE Today as well) Breakfast also uses Columbus to generate astons, but they are still put on-air manually.

Bigted is used by many other areas of the BBC and it DOES NOT control the vision mixer.

If used for timing (in some regions it is not), when a VT starts the PA or director hits a button, which starts a timer. A counter then times the VT (based on the duration entered in ENPS) and a synthesized voice (digital Fiona, not digital Dorothy) also calls astons, but the person operating the vision mixer still puts them on-air, so there is someone checking that the aston makes sense!.

This is the system used in N6 in London, and many of the BBC regions. (BIGTED was designed and produced by the BBC in London)

(One benefit is that the vision mixer is able to tell Bigted when an aston has been used, and once this has happened Bigted will change automatically to the next, reducing the number of button presses for the operator)

(September 2001)