Holding Slides

Hi All

Being only new to TV Forum and to the fascinating world of TV history, I was astonished by holding slides. As I am only young, I have never really known a time when programmes were advertised using a still image and the continuity announcers voice. Having looked on TV Ark, I have seen how they were frequently used, untill about 1997: the limit of my memory.

Looking at TV Ark, and on the TV itself, I have not seen a holding slide since the rebrand to the current ident selection. Having believd that they had been assigned to the pages of history alongside the closedowns and globes, I was shocked to see a Holding Slide during this mornings line up. It was for BBC Three and Lee Nelson's Well Good Show. It was shown immediately after today's Homes under the Hammer (7/7/10).

Has anybody else seen the existance for holding slides, perhaps fopr some of te other channels. BBC Three's slide was similar to a billboard, so I wonder whether the other channels will have their slides in their own style.

TVnut15

Welcome to the forum.

Up until about 10-15 years ago junctions often included a mixture of trailers, slides and clocks (a combination which continued to exist on S4C in Wales until early 2007, and even now they have some junctions which are accompanied by nothing more than the announcer's voice!). As you'll know, generally speaking junctions today are just made up of a string of trailers and the ident.

Slides are still used on many channels - I doubt there's a technical limitation to putting in an completely static slide but most modern slides are animated in some way - BBC One slides, for example, animate on in the same way as the trailer endboard does. They're often used during the Sign Zone on BBC One or schools programmes on Two, advertising Panorama, when there's a need to inform viewers that a programme's been dropped, or in and out of breaks sometimes on ITV and Channel 4.

All of these are in the style of the channels' current branding - some regions might use them more than others and they're usually (though not always) animated rather than static now, but the concept of the 'slide' as opposed to a full-length trailer still remains.

The reason why static slides are now very rare is twofold. First, the animation makes the junction flow better and makes it visually more interesting. But second, modern day playout systems aren't always manned 24/7 so they employ silence and freeze monitors which set of alarms if a picture freezes for more than a few seconds. Deliberately allowing lengthy freeze frames is therefore frowned on because it can literally set all the bells ringing!

Discovery Real Time were putting on a still image after each episode of the last series of Wheeler Dealers a month or two ago, saying you could also watch it on Discovery Shed. About the only place I've seen a proper slide!

BBC One have been using them recently for EastEnders straight after an EastEnders promo!

Plus BBC Three have been using them for that Well Good Show thingy.

While you're completely right in what you say Tony, this is one element of modern presentation I despise. It's not so much the animation, more the insistence in putting background music on everything.

Nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but the animated systems in particular have an unfortunate habit of crashing the sound level down and up when an announcer is speaking, and the music itself often crashes badly into the next segment.

Idents should be silent at the point at which the V/O starts speaking in my opinion. Either that, or employ a human being to mix the sound levels properly.

Really? I've never heard of channels having such devices, not ones that would react to a still picture anyway (if it's non-sync, non-legal or corrupted data that's a different matter). Most TV channels do have lengthy periods of static screen and silence every night of course and films

You're right though that automation and computers have a lot to do with it, but it's more to do with what can be done now compared with years ago. In a manual gallery running lots of short trails, putting on graphics and fast cutting was impractical. At the BBC most junctions were literally handed over to the announcer who was essentially 1 man with a load of slides and live sources that didn't need cueing or running. Now that the director or operator uses a computer to run the show it can be preview, load, cue, run and cut multiple items with a great deal of accuracy. I'm sure they would have liked to have upped the pace but they just couldn't.

Of course, ITV did used to run lots of recorded items back to back but even their ad breaks were slower paced. ITV had another reason for using slides, clocks and in vision announcers in their continuity - it hid the changes in sync before taking a programme from another station. A recorded device such as a VT machine couldn't handle it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er4UyIqC2s4 - this video shows off the BBC One holding slide off rather well. Quite nice how it all fades and blends in my opinion.

I can't think of any commercially available kit that would give such functionality ?
As you say, corrupt signal yes, but a 'legal' frozen image, no ?

It is feasible to produce something like that. I was involved in an automated archiving system for a large European broadcaster, we did produce a box that would detect lengthy periods of colour bars, frozen image, or black on the source tape, and not ingest those portions, but it was custom, and required an awful lot of refinement to get it working reliably.

That's a rather nice example - though I'm fairly sure the current look also has a version where half the screen is a still from the programme.

Tony - I can't remember if it was you or one of your colleagues who told me that the Radio Times slide came in very handy when a opt-out programme finished a bit early, and there was a bit of time to fill to catch up with network. The script ("and full details of all of this week's programmes can be found in the new edition of the Radio Times, which is out now") could be stretched from 5 to 15 seconds as required.


Freeze & silence detectors are fairly common in tx suites and coding & mux operations - the old DOC used to have alarms going off all the time; generally monitoring off-air reception, in case a coder or its incoming feed had died. I think they used Miranda probes.
(Generally the culprit was a set top box overheating and freezing; sometimes it would be the end credits of a film being a bit quiet, and despite having a long delay set, divisions on BBC Parliament would often set one off.)

Yes - the one in the video is more like the breakdown slide. The usual slides - used for the sign zone and the odd other time (ie when EastEnders was moved around a lot for the football they were used in prime time) look like this:

http://theidentgallery.com/bbc1/BBC1-2007-SLIDE-1.jpg
Picture from The Ident Gallery

Of course the difference between the example above and the "classic" style of holding slides is the time and date on it - essentially like the end board of a promo and pointing to a specific broadcast, rather than the old style of just the programme name and channel which could be used at all opportunities in junctions. I think the last time I saw one of these was around 2002/3...