Look East

The TV Room has now updated it's section on Look east. Plenty of high quality images on there. Hopefully some video on the way too.

http://www.thetvroom.com/area-b/p-bbc-one-reg-news-east-a.shtml

In fact, two things to add;

1) Love the in brief headline astons. Nice, especially when joined with the location straps.

2) Love the joint location / live straps. Nice nice on screen.

It's all so crisp. It's fantastic!

They do still seem to be getting hang on the new technology though - the captions and graphics seem to pop up and disappear erractically at times. The location and LIVE graphic also doesn't line up.

They REALLY need to change the picture or camera used on the rear projection at the back of the studio. Far too low res and unclear.

Nothing to do directly with the camera - more to do with the immense size of the projector. In the standard presenter close up they are only showing a small portion of the projector - so unless an HDTV camera and projector were used - meaning only a fraction of the actual backdrop camera shot is used. Because they are effectively zooming in on a small portion it is soft and blurry.

(However the projected backdrop is covered with PAL or other aliasing artefacts - so they either need to sort out a component feed or wind the aperture correction down a bit... It also looks like it is using a fisheye lens or is UNARCed 4:3 - some people look a bit wide as they walk around in the background. A fisheye lens is not known to enhance picture sharpness...)

Anglia News has been doing both of those for years!

But bear in mind that the "Oxford" studio is actually at Southampton too.
As the "Oxford" set was supposed to look like one corner of the main set, they could have continued that illusion by making similar "news cafe" adaptions to those done to the main set. Or, if all else fails, revert to a CSO curtain in the "Oxford" studio, and a photograph/looped recording of one corner of the main set.

Uh-oh. On Freeview in the west (of the east, if you follow) we just got BBC LDN...

There is a very long history to BBC Three Counties being called BBC Three Counties Radio - I was at the station when it changed. Originally long long ago there was a plan to have a Radio Bedfordshire, Radio Hertfordshire and Radio Buckinghamshire but then there were cut backs so it didn't happen. Radio Bedfordshire always covered MK and bits of Hertfordshire. But once it was known that there wasn't enough cash for full stations the BBC had to think about how to cover Herts & Bucks. There was a lot of debate about the name as up until that point the county or area was always in the name (even GLR and GMR stood for London and Manchester). For about 18 months Radio Bedfordshire became Radio Bedfordshire with Herts and Bucks ... which was always a mouthful to say on air and crap in branding terms. A lot of research was done into what the best name would be and there are other organisations that cover the same counties (and some call themselves similar things) BBC Beds, Herts and Bucks was also considered AFAIK in the end BBC Three Counties Radio was plumped for - a bigger studio was set up in St.Albans and a new studio opened in MK as well as other smaller studios as part of the re-brand. Some of those have now gone under other cuts. So there we go.

Still, LDN has the better looks, with the weather astons anyway...

http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/ldnweather.jpg

Is that Peter Cockroft?

Yep - Peter has been doing BBC LDN weather since they stopped using the network weather presenter at 1330 and 1830.

Well Look East has trouble tonight. They failed to opt out at 1830 - we had the headlines and top of BBC LDN. Then they opted but were running so late failed to opt back in for the end news summary from the 1800 and came in during the national weather.