Holding Slides

Difficult to even consider these as presentation items since, in many cases, these graphics are sent as data to your set top box and generated as stills by the box itself. They aren't transmitted in real time, and the actual programme feed is supressed because usually it's been given over to an entirely different television station. I must admit I've never come across the term 'holding slide' as such. But although these graphics are of course not 35mm slides, the technical term for stills is still 'slides' because it's a description everyone recognises.

We still have 2 boxes of old 35mm slides in the pres suite at UTV that we saved from the skip!

Out of interest, what is the official term that was used for this style of slide
http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/bbcone/images_cont/1985/slides/bbc1_pebblemill_1985.jpg
(from TV-Ark who also call it a holding slide)

I wonder if the term "holding slide" may have been coined to refer to the "Follows Shortly" slide for the next programme during schools programming?

My understanding was always that they were simply "slides", but that they were referred to as "holding slides" (at least this is what a TTTV transmission controller stated) when there was a fault in transmission and they required an appropriate image to "hold" the vision. These were, of course, generally (though not necessarily) the same slides shown before the break immediately before a programme to tell viewers that the show was coming next, and on occasion trotted out to inform of what was coming later.

I say not necessarily because of course TSW/Westward never used these slides to trail a programme coming next, and Tyne Tees only used them intermittently in the case of faults (alternating with a "This Is A Fault/Please Do Not Adjust Your Set" electronically-generated message or a simple static slide of the company logo).

I think a lot of the time a "holding slide" was whatever the controller managed to throw up at the time

That's a point I'd forgotten - Yorkshire used to introduce programmes over these slides in the early 80s rather than using an ident or IVC

http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/itvyorkshire/continuity.html

Indeed, this is the case with many terrestrial stations, not on Sky though - when a station goes off air or changes EPG place it's just a blue screen. Some channels have an overnight slide coming out of their playout suites overnight which is not necessarily seen by all viewers - Virgin for example replace off air channels with a video stream carrying a caption (not generated in the box) even when Sky viewers are seeing a 'back at 6am' caption

Yes, that makes sense. When they are just on for a few seconds as continuity they aren't 'holding' anything

I suppose it's possible that the phrase has become common on the net because maybe it came from a station that did not generally broadcast the slides, but had them produced *only* for the purposes of fault covering.

That would therefore be the modern term. But as I've not spoken to a controller in many years this is just speculation.

Umm, interesting, thanks. I've never had a client request one.

I presume that's why BBC or Sky News will show a looped bit of footage lasting about 10 seconds, rather that a static image when there's an 'audio only' report or interview. It's one thing to try and keep the viewers attention, but quite another to keep the monitoring happy !

I'm not aware of any directive to news or other programme makers not to use stills or still graphics... although in practice, a subtle animation is usually put in - such as a zoom on a still - just to make it look a bit more visually interesting.

ditto for two minutes' silences - you'll often get 'ambient silence' played in instead. Sounds fantastic* on heavily compressed commercial radio stations.

* terrible

Excellent! I imagine most of those slides are ones created for local ads which the CA voiced live, which UTV were still running as late as the mid 1990s.

From what I remember, UTV used unbranded programme slides produced by other companies (I have some off-air examples which were sourced from Thames) and very rarely produced ones for their own productions (I've yet to come across any examples) until they began producing their own computer generated ones around 1988.