Channel 4 pre-1993 regional opt outs

Was it not possible then? Presumably they must have had to do the same to every feed that was going to air on ITV as the transition between programmes were always smooth at least in the regions I watched

I recall an old conversation on here that explained that synchronising different sources in the 1970s and earlier was a very manual process. It was one reason there was a lot of use of slides and IVC -- the local station was slowly brought into sync with the incoming feeds by knocking the timing forward gradually over several seconds, which can be done with a camera but not with a VT.

If there was no time for that, the transition was not smooth, and a splat would be the result.

I guess if the ITV company had permanently synched with C4 in a hived-off area there would in theory be no need for that, but it seems that in practice at least two stations weren't managing it straight away (and I'm pretty sure TSW had a similar issue in the early days).

The Quantel 1751 was well established by 1982 and I suspect its Questech equivalent (2101P ?) was too. If you have a continuous steam of incoming network progs on the same network incoming feed you only needed one of course plus a spare.

If I remember correctly where I worked C4 was synchronised to a Pres 2 pulse chain and the comms machine sat on those pulses too.

Yes that's right, cameras and slide scanners (glorified cameras) could cope with the syncs being nudged so that frames were not exactly 625 lines, some were more or less to bring the station syncs in line with the incoming feed. So the pulse chains linked to the ITV side of things would be constantly changing for each programme, before synchronisers came along.

The C4 operation would need to synchronise to the incoming C4 feed.

I think it's fair to say that the little regions were several years behind the larger ones when it came to just about everything technology-related, and had a tendency to squeeze every last month of life out of the expensive stuff where they could.

True in general, but Harlech of necessity had a fiercely complicated transmission setup more-or-lesss from the start to cope with the West-Wales-General Service splits, and later on Channel beat the mainland companies to ENG; possibly in their case as there wasn't the union resistance to face down.

ENG is an interesting one, as I believe the minnows in general were quicker to adopt than the big guys. I believe Grampian were one of the first, and Tyne Tees certainly claimed to be the first in England. I guess much of that was down to the rural patches they served.

Yes, you think of how big the Grampian region was and how much time it would have saved sending video down a line rather than carrying film back to Aberdeen.

I'd have thought for the smaller companies the cost savings of video versus film might have been a factor too, the bigger companies like Granada and Thames will have still been using a lot of film for their non news productions

Yes, the incoming feed from C4 would have been a nice clean continuous signal, C4 themselves used frame-syncs for incoming feeds, so nothing would (should) have been 'banging around'. Quite unlike, as you point out the network feed coming in for ITV. It would have been like the Net 1 feed for the BBC regions, so just slave lock to that ?

The main impediments to ENG were 'political/industrial'. I think the smaller companies found it easier and quicker to obtain agreements, than the larger companies. The fact the smaller companies tended to have larger geographical spreads was just a co-incidence

When Engineering Announcements moved from ITV to Channel 4 in 1983, who would've broadcast it? One of the ITV regions, such as TVS, as Winchester was in their area, or Channel 4 themselves at Charlotte Street?

I believe that the network was switched to Crawley Court directly for the intro and broadcast.