cue dots

ITV's used to go off at 7secs to go, as that was the run up time for the Telecine machine, playing out the ads from film !



Even less neat in the days of the confused BBC regional announcer who forgot he was doing TV that day, not radio. In those days radio faders were down for open and up for close, whereas TV ones were the opposite. Hence the junction which was entirely silent, save for the words "RUN VT"

Tell them what time they're on air (having checked that your clock shows the same time as theirs) or tell them what your last words are on the symbol. If they're running from, say, a 5" clock you could give them run words 5" before your last words, but it's easier to just give an on air time.

In a similar vein, TTTV did something similar with YTV where the Newcastle-based announcer used the same mic for talkback with Leeds as for the announcements but was switched over to another channel to avoid the wrong stuff going out live. On more than one occasion we got an IV announcement, followed by a period of a black screen where you could hear that the mic was still being transmitted, then the anno saying something like "hello Leeds we have no transmission...". Not especially professional-looking!

You used to see quite a bit of visual cues being used to time things accurately on regional TV. Watching some announcers a fair few of them gave a visual cue a couple of seconds before they stopped talking to enable the tx controller to perfect the transition into the programme. Bill Steel, if you looked carefully in the Newcastle days, could be seen to wink very subtly a couple of seconds before the end of the announcement. The fade to black always used to occur exactly as the announcer said the last word of his piece -- a feat given it was all ad-libbed. The reasoning being that a slightly longer period of a black screen looks better than a second or two of the anno looking gormless at the end.

TV pres was an art-form back then as opposed to the clinical efficiency seen now.

I noticed cue dots very clearly (more so than I've recently noticed them) on ITV4 on its launch night.

I really don't think there's any excuse for big, ignorant cue dots in this day and age. Even if you have lost talkbacks you should have access to a landline or at the very least a mobile and have the numbers of the relevant OB at hand. Quite apart from that, digital delays make them meaningless.

How do digital delays make them meaningless? In the case of the football on the opening night of ITV4, they were there to cue breaks.
There is a digital delay, but that delay effects both the end of the part and the beginning of the next part, so there is nothing meaningless about them!

The studio will put the cue dot on until 5 seconds before the break (or whatever ITV4 have agreed) and both pres and the studio will know that a fixed duration break will go in the gap.
For arguments sake, lets say the break is 3 minutes. Pres won't roll the break until the cue dot goes and the studio won't start their next part until 3 minutes (or 3 minutes + 5 seconds) have gone.

Cue dots are by far the most efficient way of rolling breaks on time in live programmes and you can hardly complain about a tiny square out up in the corner of the screen, no bigger than 15×15ps!

In that case the digital delay doesn't matter, but what's wrong with the football gallery counting transmission to the break?

In the pres environment, keeping things as quiet and as simple as possible is best! Besides, digital delays are less precise on an unassociated audio feed. If a mobile phone is used, there is a delay. If a landline is used there is no delay etc.

What else could be more reliable than something that is included in the programme going out on air?! As long as the programme is there, the cue is there! No dealing with dropped lines etc!

But a cue dot is much more easily missed by a TC than an audible count. Surely the main thing is what the viewer sees, and a big ugly cue dot is undesirable if they notice it and it distracts them from the programme?

Thanks for telling me about pres environments - I wouldn't know anything about that.

The delay on a talkback circuit/mobile phone is a hell of a lot less than the time it takes a human being to notice a cue dot and press a button. Apart from the possible exception of Wimbledon (or such events) which is fed to a large number of international broadcasters, there is no need whatsoever to use such an old fashioned and rudimentary way of signalling. It's the television equivalent of semaphore.

I don't think they're called cue dots. Do you mean a VT clock?

Cue dot - from Transdiffusion (see top left of pic):

http://www.transdiffusion.org/intertel/images/bbcwsbb1.jpg

VT clock - from MHP:

http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/continuity/channel5/c5_vt2.gif