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Channel 4 pre-1993 regional opt outs

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MA
Markymark
ttt posted:
I didn't think Betacam was considered good enough for anything other than ENG?


That's right, and remained the case with vanilla BetaCam. BetaCamSP was launched in 1986, there was a lot of lobbying to the IBA to allow that to be used for trails and idents, eventually the IBA relented in 88 ish, Thames and Anglia had a similar struggle with Panasonic's M2. Then in 1993 C4 themselves refused to have programmes supplied on DigiBeta (launched that year) because they were worried about the cascade effects of its 2:1 (ish) compression, with their 8:1 compression distribution network. They would only allow the uncompressed D5 format. How times have changed eh !
TT
ttt
I noticed the changeover at Anglia around that time (1989 or so). I think they must have put in some automation gear during that period as well (it was always fairly obvious on-air).

I don't know if it was the MII gear or something else, but the commercial breaks / promos became very "hissy" audio-wise for a while, worse than the background noise that had been present for years on TT. The video quality didn't seem quite right to me either (blacks sometimes seemed to be rendered a grey colour). Thames suffered from neither of those problems.
TE
Technologist
BBC used a one line ITS on line 21/334 I.e as close to picture as possible ...
Subtitles were on line 20/333 and Ceeefax abs datacast were on lines from7/329 to 19/332.
The ITS did carry count down data from London. , and one line ITS was automaticity replaced when a region opted - so that the ITS was from the same source as the video .
There is some reference to this in a SMPTE meeting
https://www.smpte.org/sections/united-kingdom/events/untold-stories-teletext-celebrating-40-years-digital-broadcasting

And ETSI publish Television systems; Code of practice for allocation of services in the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_tr/101200_101299/101233/01.01.01_60/tr_101233v010101p.pdf
Which tends to cover the itv ch4,situation with ITS on 18/331 and 19/332 ...
They had subtitles in line 335 only
SC
Si-Co
Markymark posted:
I've just been having a clear out, and found an article from an 1982 edition of International Broadcast Engineer.
It takes about a Logica Teletext System to relay information and cues to the the ITV companies. It used Line 21 and was stripped out leaving the ITV companies before hitting the transmitters. Oracle Teletext back then was Lines 15-18.

Quote:
'Should an ITV company wish to operate its commercial machines automatically, C4 also transmits four distinct cues on the line 21 system, which can be assigned to any such function. In addition this Logica system also provides an electronic mail service from Charlotte St to the ITV stations, feeding C4 schedules and other data to hard-copy printers at regional studios

Edit:

Found more, a 1988 article.

Quote:
'In late 1987, they added a Sony Betacart machine for the 09:30 to 12:00 Schools Progs, which are recorded by Central TV, complete with announcements on a separate cartridge. The machine just needs loading, and is controlled by CATS, although a 1 inch copy is made the night before and run in parallel as a back up.

Edit:

Fill yer boots

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7alhtva7f31hjbb/C4_scans.pdf?dl=0


Fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing! I remember reading a shorter article - possibly in the TV Times or IBA Yearbook around 1982 - explaining how a whole day’s junctions were loaded/programmes in advance and mentioning that the ITV regions inserted the ads. It went into much less detail, of course.
BL
bluecortina
JKDerry posted:
VMPhil posted:
Thinking about it, it's interesting that Channel 4 didn't bring in a new look at the start of ’93 to signify the new era, given the existing look was already ten years old at that point. It took them another three years to have a major rebrand.

Channel 4 was not changing much in 1993. It was moving from being part of ITV to being their own independent company. Which was a good thing in my opinion. It was not like changing franchises. It was just a change in the operating structure and management of the channel.


Channel 4 was never part of ITV.
BL
bluecortina
ttt posted:
Markymark posted:
Inspector Sands posted:
Fantastic stuff, thank you for that.

Amazing to see how advanced they were with their technology back in 1982. As far as I know most other broadcasters, including the BBC, didn't have that sort of automation for at least a decade.

Also worth noting that fully automatic playout and recorded announcements are not a new thing


I remember visiting them in 1986, and they had just had an application to play out their animated ident from BetaCam/BetaCart (rather than lacing up a 1inch VT each time) rejected by the IBA, looks like they possibly had success a yaer later !


Hmmm. That's interesting -- I was told that the main reason TT did not generally use animated idents in the late 80s/early 90s was because of this very reason (the need to use up a VT or cine), and as a result only used them at specific points in the day (startup, before news and the like). I wonder if they even had the conversation with the IBA?

A number of ITV companies used the ACR machines (tailing the ident after the break and promos) didn't they? YTV certainly seemed to do this for many years; quite a lot of their breaks around 1991-2 were just a single chain (promo, recorded "next" trail, ads, promo, ident into programme) direct from cart, often resulting in a pregnant pause before the next programme started.


In fact YTV never had ACR machines, they did have the RCA equivalents(TCR 100) followed by the Bosch BCN cart machine. After that I don't know.
BL
bluecortina
ttt posted:
Inspector Sands posted:
Markymark posted:
I've just been having a clear out, and found an article from an 1982 edition of International Broadcast Engineer.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7alhtva7f31hjbb/C4_scans.pdf?dl=0

Fantastic stuff, thank you for that.

Amazing to see how advanced they were with their technology back in 1982. As far as I know most other broadcasters, including the BBC, didn't have that sort of automation for at least a decade.

Also worth noting that fully automatic playout and recorded announcements are not a new thing


It certainly shows though. Compare C4's early presentation with the BBC, or just about any of the ITV companies, and the difference looking back is like night and day.

Some of the smaller ITV regions still hadn't really caught up in the early 1990s.


Very tricky for an ITV company in that period of any scale to use automation when the timings of so much of your on-air material is beyond your control. If you're going to have to have someone sitting in a control room intervening in an automation system you might just as well have them do it and save yourself some money on automation?
IS
Inspector Sands
bluecortina posted:

Very tricky for an ITV company in that period of any scale to use automation when the timings of so much of your on-air material is beyond your control. If you're going to have to have someone sitting in a control room intervening in an automation system you might just as well have them do it and save yourself some money on automation?

That is a good point, the schedules of the ITV companies were a lot lore complicated and variable. Channel 4 was self contained with other broadcasters following.


However automation doesn't mean fully unattended operation, even today there's human input. It just makes parts of the work easier/ cheaper/less tedious. An ACR type device is automation.for example

Even with the timings being out of your control it would still have be possible to use modern playout automation in an ITV setup like the 80s. Even if it was just for junctions and local content with lots of manual take events. You'd still need someone of course... but only one person doing it all.
JA
james-2001
Inspector Sands posted:
However automation doesn't mean fully unattended operation, even today there's human input.


Sometimes!
IS
Inspector Sands
james-2001 posted:
Inspector Sands posted:
However automation doesn't mean fully unattended operation, even today there's human input.


Sometimes!

Only the cheapest most basic channels run by themselves with no one present. Even if there's one person looking after 6 channels they still have to intervene at some point


This is a good blog post on the subject of automation which explains it better than I could:
http://www.dirtyfeed.org/2015/01/on-automation/
JA
james-2001
It feels like there's nobody running them at times, when things go wrong and it seemingly takes ages for someone to notice.
IS
Inspector Sands
james-2001 posted:
It feels like there's nobody running them at times, when things go wrong and it seemingly takes ages for someone to notice.

I think most of the time they have noticed but its a case of it taking time to identify the cause and sort, its not something in their control.


A lot of monitoring is done automatically, if theres a loss of video or audio or a frozen image for example the TC and likely others in the distribution chain will soon know about it

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