Good Morning Britain - the launch

That's more the case for cameras with remote PTZ heads (Radamec, Shotoku etc.) as the mounts lift the camera by quite a bit. Some of the early N6 National News sets didn't have a rostrum and the shots could be a bit 'toppy' but the cameras were on remotes. GMB comes from a studio with fully operated cameras and no remotes so less of an issue.

Normal peds can usually operate low enough that a rostrum isn't needed for standard seat heights, though you are operating quite close, or at the base of, your ped. Designers favour rostra or a dais because they help define a space, and add a bit of design.

Yes. The floor stages in use for GMB and previously GMTV facilitate ease of access between various parts of the set, to have to 'clump' up and down on rostra to get between parts of the set would be impractical and would heavily restrict the camera positions if they were to be somewhat marooned in the middle of a large staged area. You're right of course that the cameras can spend a fair bit of their time at the lower end of the ped as a result. As the GMB set has moved round through 90 degrees from the GMTV sets there is not a lot of room for the cameras to get away from the sets.

When AJ were using the studio it was a very much more static set up and the various staged areas were up on rostra. A completely different presentation philosophy of course.

Yes. That's the other major disadvantage of rostra. If you have lots of them in the studio and they are significant in size, when you are shooting in other areas of the set they massively reduce your camera positioning flexibility. That's why you often don't see them in smaller, flexible studios.

I had seen a news studio that had put all of its peds onto the mini jibs that can extend, and then mount them onto peds/3 wheel stands. Seemed to allow them to get the camera closer without having to bump onto the rostra.

That can help you in some situations - and makes things more flexible than not having them, but mini-jibs (or Dolphin Arm extensions) have their own challenges. They can be tricky if you go for full-size prompt hoods and under-lens preview monitors for instance.

If you are moving between a number of seated/static presentation spaces they could be a good solution, but if you need to cover a small performance area, and get a long way back - they aren't always going to help. (I know some studios where tables and desks are struck to allow peds to get into the right positions)

One of the Canadian broadcasters has a good few of their camera's coming down from the roof on rails (much like the two vertical screens in the GMB studio), a better automated system than the BBC IIRC. If that system allowed for manual operation too, then that could be another way around the problem

Months later and Good Morning Britain is still plagued with technical problems every single morning....

...?

Graphics flashing on and off screen at random points , the wrong graphics appearing , music fading in and out at the wrong times , GMB graphics appearing during Lorraine , this happens every single morning . You would have thought they would have got the hang of it by now . Before anyone says that it's Live TV and that is what happens this stuff rarely rarely happened on Daybreak .

Music fading in, only happened yesterday and was probably a human error.

GMB graphics appear during Lorraine's 9am News (although IMO it should be a GMB sting as she is usually says something like 'Lets get the news from Good Morning Britain')

Have never seeng raphics flashing on and off at random points, or the wrong graphics appearing...hmmm.

Have you not seen the numerous times when there has been no graphics on screen at all for entire segments of the show?

GMB’s graphics are meant to appear on the News bulletin, right?


This happened on Lorraine on Monday, which I have seen a few times before that.