I believe the clip on youtube is from a desk at broad street of CITV in the 90's
Seems that they already decommissioned that room back then, wondered if there was a picture of it now:
It would have still been on a Central sticker with more details than just 'Blockbusters'
Its a fake. It had nothing inside it anyway.
Why? As I said, maybe the label from an old tape box was torn off, and the box recycled. The information could be inside - and there was something suspiciously tape-like inside.
Because it would be replaced with a sticker with the Central logo on, like all the others...
It was a cheap stunt for the site to get noticed. Music department staff will not faff around pulling out tapes to look inside to see whats on it. I'm sure the Central person who said it was fake would know what they were talking about.
I notice the first batch of photos on that last page linked to shows the Sony LMS (Library Management System) control panel (the keyboard thing) and playout stack (the thing that looks like a giant choccy bar vending machine - the VTRs were in the 5 drawers to the left, and the pigeon hole banks to the right accomodated cassettes - either Beta SP or D2/D3).
Central's LMS was D2 based, the only other ones in the UK were at LWT/LNN (also D2), and at C4 Charlotte St, that was only used to bridge the gap for commercial playout from Jan 1993, until the move in 1994 to HFR.
ISTR Central tried to sell the system when they shut down Broad St, but they'd forgotton about the terms of the system licence sold to them by Sony
Just because they were left behind in a derelict building doesn't make them useful or interesting....
Maybe not the case for every programme but the only clean copies of the Crossroads themes seem to survive thanks to someone taking them out of the building after Central left. These include the rare 'mood themes'.
And the 1985 clean versions were recovered only last month from the building. Whether Carlton over looked them or whatever.. who knows.
The "Life Is A Beautiful Book" ATV startup films from 1975 were also only re-discovered when someone at Central idly played a D2 tape that was about to be chucked out from Broad Street, which turned out to contain a dub of them, apparently as a telecine grading training exercise.
Same person who found the 1964 Crossroads music in there too. Lucky he was on the ball as were to check all these things before wiping over them as they'd all been taken to be re-used.
Central's LMS was D2 based, the only other ones in the UK were at LWT/LNN (also D2), and at C4 Charlotte St, that was only used to bridge the gap for commercial playout from Jan 1993, until the move in 1994 to HFR.
Pearson, as was, had (maybe they still do) 2 Digibeta LMS's for the launch of Channel 5. I'd have thought that these would have been the last 2 to be introduced in the UK, as LMS and its rivals were soon superceeded by servers - although C5 used theirs in conjunction with a server.
LMSs were generally superceded by server technology, but often used in conjunction with FlexiCarts, a Sony DigiBeta based machine similar to an LMS. It was however a simpler, narrower machine which held far fewer tapes and usually contained one or two transports as opposed to five or more. The robotic arms when up and down a single rack of tapes rather than up/down/left/right across several racks. You can still find Flexicarts in tape ingest areas of playout centres, but AIUI they too are becoming obsolete now.
The BBC had one LMS in BBC World transmission which was used until the early 2000s. BBC 1 and 2 used a Panasonic multi-tape/transport system called a MARC (in fact they had two MARCs). ISTR Thames Television had MARCs too, though whereas the BBC's used Panasonic D3 decks, Thames' used the analogue M2 format.
LMSs were generally superceded by server technology, but often used in conjunction with FlexiCarts, a Sony DigiBeta based machine similar to an LMS. It was however a simpler, narrower machine which held far fewer tapes and usually contained one or two transports as opposed to five or more. The robotic arms when up and down a single rack of tapes rather than up/down/left/right across several racks. You can still find Flexicarts in tape ingest areas of playout centres, but AIUI they too are becoming obsolete now.
Yep, Sony stopped making them a few years ago. Automatic tape loaders aren't really required any more in playout areas as stuff is manually cached onto server once and then played multiple times from there. If it drops off the server it can be retrived from a traditional library and re-cached.
The main use of Flexicarts in recent times is for for archiving - a DVCAM one can hold about 140 (3 hour) tapes giving a big, easily accessible archive.
Quote:
The BBC had one LMS in BBC World transmission which was used until the early 2000s. BBC 1 and 2 used a Panasonic multi-tape/transport system called a MARC (in fact they had two MARCs). ISTR Thames Television had MARCs too, though whereas the BBC's used Panasonic D3 decks, Thames' used the analogue M2 format.
Indeed, and I have had the displeasure of working alongside all 4 of those MARCs! They had to be treated with care, bless em. All 'robotic' devices like that had the tendancy to throw a wobbly at times. I spent many years wrestling with Flexicarts too!
at the BBC Micro & 
If they are genuine Rolf's)
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