Cue Dots

Biggest anorak? No! The biggest anorak would have asked why does the picture move sidewards slightly at the end of the mix to the Thames Colour Prod.

Also Canadian shows, as this Hockey Night In Canada break from a Stanley Cup playoff game in the late 90s shows.



Back when playout was regional. Sound familiar?

I have to say I did notice that, and furthermore it has always interested me why that happens - I always assumed it was to do with hard switching to the second feed after the mixer had finished it's job but that's pure speculation on my part.

So, on ITV we know that the cue dot came from the originating source, be it a playout/TX suite, a studio or an OB vehicle, and was/is used to signal that the end of part was iminent. As I understand it there was no network talkback as such (hence the use of the red phone in extremis) so how did YTV (for example) know when to roll their VTR to play out the ad break or similar?

ITV didn't seem to use the system the BBC had (albeit for a different purpose) where the cue dot came on at approx -30, went off at exactly -10 and back on at -5 so it could be used to cue VT/TK which needed to be run from -10 or -5. So was it simple a case that that unless you had heard otherwise via the red phone the routine sheet timings would be right and the cue dot was just a way of saying "standby" to the various playout centres?

How about for live shows, particularly sport, where the timings had to react to events and could get changed at short notice?

I remember seeing that sort quite commonly back in the 90s!

There is a slight jump to the right at the start of the clip I've posted, it occurs right at the end of the Thames frontcap just before the Rainbow titles start. It's not as obvious as the sidewards slide you mention.

Go on then, I'll bite as it's my thread: Why does the picture move please?

Central Nottingham (according to Weekend lines) had a very petite one, well the PAL one was, the SD-SDI was normal size
There was a spec I once saw, but can't find any reference to it now, hence the dogs dinner of cue dots that still pop up now and again.

oh and you could never get bars out of Border !!

You've answered your own question really. The entire daily network schedule was planned well in advance and fine tuning to it was carried out to it during the actual day (and evening). Remember too, that the commercial breaks were clearly defined, in terms of their timing, by ITA/IBA/ITC and Ofcom rules so that pretty much determined when breaks were scheduled - plus or minus a little bit. If the tx schedule said the break was going to occur at any given time then it would - it's as simple as that. In the event of a live programme then most likely the cue dot would be put up at around the time the break was expected and would stay up until the usual 5 seconds to go, it wasn't uncommon for a cue dot to be up for a couple of minutes, maybe longer, if the timing really was unpredictable.

Edit. And the red phone was used frequently throughout the day not 'in extremis' as you put it. Was used at around 11am for the programme planning depts around the network to discuss future programme planning issues between themselves, and it was used sometime around late afternoon to fine tune the evening schedule between all the transmission controllers around the network. It could be used anytime, just pick it and talk although it was considered bad form to talk on it longer than necessary.

Further edit. And -5 seconds was used as the 'cue to run the break signal' because in the early days of ITV the comms almost invariably came off a 35mm telecine machine that needed 5 seconds to guarantee run up and stable pictures and sound.

Well it looks to me as though this recording originated as a network feed. The sideways jump ( to the left) is where the network switcher has switched the outgoing network feed from the output of the presentation desk to a direct feed of the VT machine itself (It's usually a shorter timing path than the same VTR machine through the presentation desk) - so, time is 'won' and the picture moves to the left at the switch point.

Other than that it could have been a faulty vision mixer in the edit suite or the Colour Prod slide was not correctly timed into the vision mixer in the edit suite - but that would be very unprofessional and Thames were a very, very professional company.

But surely this recording is taken from a DVD and therefore (presumably) dubbed from the original master. Why would a network feed even be involved in this?

As an aside such picture jumps were quite common on productions in the 1970s and 1980s, both BBC and ITV (especially when the early Quantel and similar devices started to be used). Thames were professional but was this really considered a big deal?

I have no idea what the original source of the recording is, it may have ended up on a dvd but that has no bearing on where it was sourced from. Rainbow was a networked programme that's why a network feed might be involved.

Yes, Quantel and similar kit could produce sideways picture shifts. But none of that appears to have figured in this programme (although I haven't watched it end to end as I have no interest in it!), a straightforward VTR recording of a programme coming out of a studio should have no picture shifts in it, neither should one that has been edited either. A big deal? Yes, where I worked in ITV such things would have been considered a 'big deal'.

The differences in attitudes even within the ITV system is fascinating. This was an era where some programmes were recorded with barely legible credits, grubby production captions with scratches and even hairs present on network productions and so on, and then we have Thames being professional to the nth degree.