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Channel 4 pre-1993 regional opt outs

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MA
Markymark
ttt posted:
If the programme was optional (and the point about Grampian does suggest that timing may have been a regular issue) it does beg the question of why the IBA didn't just send the recording up the line an hour early and just let the individual contractors get on with just playing it out as they saw fit.

I mean, 5 or 10 minutes before start of programmes and they had to just fit it in? Bit draconian really.


I suspect back then you would have come up against industrial relations, and possible overtime payments for 'out of normal hours' operations.
SP
Steve in Pudsey
ttt posted:
Si-Co posted:
That seems to be a pretty good guess at what happened - although I’m sure those editions of EA were the standard ten minutes in length, as Tyne Tees left the programme at about 9.18, just as John Lovell or one of his colleagues was saying “Before we go, we’d like to remind you of...”. The transition out of the programme looked like a manual fade, with the picture fading to black moments before the sound faded out. Then after a second or two, the IBA Tyne Tees caption faded up and the music began as it normally would.


Is it not possible that the moment he started that "before we go..." was actually an agreed opt-out point, and the TC simply overshot by a couple of seconds?

Maybe the idea was to fade to an IBA slide and cut the sound at that point and it went wrong?

If they were going to that kind of length why not just schedule the thing a few minutes earlier?
SC
Si-Co
ttt posted:
Si-Co posted:
That seems to be a pretty good guess at what happened - although I’m sure those editions of EA were the standard ten minutes in length, as Tyne Tees left the programme at about 9.18, just as John Lovell or one of his colleagues was saying “Before we go, we’d like to remind you of...”. The transition out of the programme looked like a manual fade, with the picture fading to black moments before the sound faded out. Then after a second or two, the IBA Tyne Tees caption faded up and the music began as it normally would.


Is it not possible that the moment he started that "before we go..." was actually an agreed opt-out point, and the TC simply overshot by a couple of seconds?

Maybe the idea was to fade to an IBA slide and cut the sound at that point and it went wrong?


If that was the case, why would they totally ignore any opt point the following week, and shorten their startup sequence instead?
TT
ttt
Si-Co posted:
ttt posted:
Si-Co posted:
That seems to be a pretty good guess at what happened - although I’m sure those editions of EA were the standard ten minutes in length, as Tyne Tees left the programme at about 9.18, just as John Lovell or one of his colleagues was saying “Before we go, we’d like to remind you of...”. The transition out of the programme looked like a manual fade, with the picture fading to black moments before the sound faded out. Then after a second or two, the IBA Tyne Tees caption faded up and the music began as it normally would.


Is it not possible that the moment he started that "before we go..." was actually an agreed opt-out point, and the TC simply overshot by a couple of seconds?

Maybe the idea was to fade to an IBA slide and cut the sound at that point and it went wrong?


If that was the case, why would they totally ignore any opt point the following week, and shorten their startup sequence instead?


Yeah you're right, just throwing ideas out there really.

It was 37 years ago now and we'll never get to the bottom of it even if we had the TC in question join the forum Very Happy
NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
Let's pour our speculative resources into making a flux capacitor a reality, attach it to a DeLorean and go back to 1982 to solve the mystery once and for all. While we're there we can solve other long-standing forum mysteries, I'm sure there's a plentiful supply of plutonium to get us back home. If not, plenty of trains around Very Happy
RO
robertclark125
Getting back on to Channel 4, but still with Engineering Announcements, when ITV Schools on 4 began in 1987, initially the Oracle pages crashed out at 09:26.57 and it was black for one moment before the Rotomotion glided onto screen. With Engineering announcements ending at 09:25 or circa, once it was finished, what did C4 show, if anything, before Schools programmes started?

Obviously I know that once the Channel 4 daily started in 1989, there was a holding slide for the three minutes from 09:25 until 09:28.
MA
Markymark
robertclark125 posted:
Getting back on to Channel 4, but still with Engineering Announcements, when ITV Schools on 4 began in 1987, initially the Oracle pages crashed out at 09:26.57 and it was black for one moment before the Rotomotion glided onto screen. With Engineering announcements ending at 09:25 or circa, once it was finished, what did C4 show, if anything, before Schools programmes started?


I think it was just black and silence, or perhaps a burst of ETP-1, it was only two or three mins worth ? Dead Air wasn't so much of a 'crime' back then as it is now
JA
james-2001
Neil Jones posted:
If not, plenty of trains around Very Happy


Let's try getting a pacer up to 88mph!
HA
harshy Founding member
ttt posted:
Markymark posted:
ttt posted:

I should clarify that by splat, in this case I'm referring to a tearing on-screen where (I think) the switching was done half way through scanning a frame (or at least that's how it looked). If the screen was black at the time there was nothing visible.


I think I know the effect you mean. It depended sometimes on the make and model of the TV. We had a Philips telly for a while. If there was a horizontal timing error, and the switch was made during 'black', what you'd see would be the 'colour burst' dart across the screen (this was a band of subcarrier that when (because it could be viewed) viewed on professional monitors was a muddy brown vertical stripe in the blanking on the left side of the picture.

If there was a timing error (only needed to be 10 or 20 microseconds) on some TVs the burst would dart onto the screen, and as the TV corrected itself, it would dart back off again. Hard to describe, it would all happen within a frame time period, and you could often hear the line output transformer in the telly 'chirp' as it missed a beat.
As the phase was random while this happened, it could end up as any colour too.

*


I'm not sure it was anything as interesting as that, as I say there was no loss of sync and nine times out of ten the transition was completely clean.

I got the impression they were switching without using a mixer (but the two sources were still synched/locked). YTV's initial provision of TT pres was similar; they'd send TT a mixture of a dirty feed, clean network feed, and TT-specific items up the line and TT would opt out for continuity at the appropriate points. In order to prevent TT crashing into YTV continuity/idents at the start of programmes they'd switch to a clean network feed a few seconds before a programme started then back to the YTV dirty feed a few seconds into the programme. At that point you would see a slight picture tear (more noticeable than the Bilsdale opt, but that may have been because the two sources were carrying the same material in the YTV case), coupled with a minor change in picture hue/saturation.

In fact thinking about it some older TV programmes made in the 1970s exhibited the same atrefact when cutting between cameras. Just an unclean cut.

Why did TT get a dirty feed from Yorkshire? I remember in 1993 the amount of times the YTV Chevron seem to be reasonably often I remember one afternoon when we got the full YTV ident and the local show for Yorkshire viewers, Help Yourself which iirc had the 1987 Yorkshire Television serving the community ident flash up in TTTV land.
SP
Steve in Pudsey
That was when the companies merged and they decided to have YTV do the playout for both to save money
CL
Closedown
Si-Co posted:
Wonderful that you found those details so quickly! What were Tyne Tees showing those morning after The Good Word and NE News? Any indication of where their first programme originated from? On the second week, scheduled programming in all regions may have changed due to the Falklands War, though I don’t recall the first programme being affected. .

Bailey's Bird was at 0930, and in common with the rest of the morning, seems to have been played out locally. The same applies to Grampian's schedule for that morning until 1100, when they make have taken Sesame Street from Granada - although equally it could have been a local origination of a different episode.
NG
noggin Founding member
ttt posted:
It wasn't a wipe as such - those two splodges remained on-screen throughout the time the clock was there and moved in a 'wibbly' action, waving from left to right like the kind of animation you get before a dream sequence. They only used it for the ads but it was always there - the caption said "ITV CLOCKS" during Night Time programmes and "C4 CLOCKS" on C4.


That's still a wipe effect. If you leave a wipe with some edge modulation at a fixed position in its transition you end up with a wobbly edged, but otherwise static, effect. Effectively you just leave the T-bar fader mid-way through the transition...

(On some mixers you can also use a keyer to do something similar as a "pre-set pattern" key, where the wipe generator is used to generate the key signal)

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