Identify the correct year for the Pres.

So the captions were just pointed at by the same camera that was used for the announcer?

It never really occurred to me that captions/clocks etc were filmed using a regular, moveable camera. I always assumed they were in some sort of fixed caption slide scabber type device (I know the BBC had their 'noddy' device)

Isnt there photo somewhere of BBC pres with shows a movable camera with 9 differernt slides/cards/idents/clocks.?

Is this what you mean?

http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/bbcone/images_idents/1974/bbc1noddy.jpg

Credit: TV Ark

Yes, that's the BBC 1 'Noddy' Camera. There's video of it in action 35" into in this video from the early 1980s:


There is some debate on Wikipedia as to whether it was known as Noddy because it nodded up and down (though it also panned left to right) or because it stood for Nexus Orthicon Display Device (NODD). There was also a slide scanner called "Big Ears" as it held slides in magazines either side of the 'camera' so looked (slightly) like it had ears...

I think the NODD idea has been thoroughly debunked. The fact that there was an accompanying dual slide scanner called Big Ears adds to it. I think there are EngInf articles which simply refer to Noddy.

I would think that LWT would not use a slide scanner for the ident caption.

The picture quality on those things, especially for solid, dark colours was never that great (washed out and uneven colours). They got away with it for photos but an ident just would look crap done that way.

Tyne Tees *did* use that method during 1988 (having previously effectively never used static ident slides, preferring to use IVC even for a couple of seconds). The ident never looked right (and the CGI ident brought in that September was god-awful on the slide version -- the sand background generally being rendered a dirty orange), but it was only done that way for a few months until the digital slide store came online.

I believe the stations that did use static ident captions, used a black-and-white still store and electronically added the colour using lumakey. Southern used this to good effect, as it allowed their film-based ident to transition to the clock, retaining consistent colouring of the blue background throughout. LWT, with a multi-coloured ident didn't have that luxury.

Thanks for that, though I wasn't thinking of slides as such, some sort of fixed 'scanner' for caption cards. Think of a horizontal rostrum camera. Not sure of the right term - caption scanner?

Slide scanners were used regularly throughout ITV as they were considered a very high quality source of pictures, remember the BBC's test card F came off one too. Given the nature of the capture device and subsequent display device it was only natural to get a variation in colour quality between sources. Of course LWT had slide scanners to source pictures, including LWT captions etc. In the end it was all replaced with a Quantel DLS library system but the pictures still had to be sourced from somewhere. Rollers and colour prods could of course come from cameras looking at static captions but that sort of thing went out with the introduction of digital library kit.

Southern's coloured static idents were either sourced from a colour slide scanner (they had two dual units) or a caption scanner - which was monochrome and fed through a 'cox box' to colourise the output - quite easy to get consistent results using a waveform monitor and vectorscope although I recall the unit may have had a number of preset values.

The mix you refer to was from a pre-recorded ident off the ACR to the colourised clock (which was at the other end of one of the caption scanners - they had two, and each was 'dual port'.) No still store involved.

I read an anecdote, which I think I remember fairly accurately, from either the very early days of LWT at Wembley, or the latter days of Rediffusion, somebody going into MCR and being surprised at their caption stand arrangement. They were simply placing the captions in front of "Mitch", the original Associated Rediffusion on-screen clock.

Can anyone remember the clock used by Central at the start? its just the ATV one rebrand, but how long did it last, I wonder why Central never really used clocks for most of its time on air.

I don't think Central EVER used a pres clock ?

They really were ahead of their time (Mulitiple puns not intended)