Look East

The trailer on Radio Suffolk has been advertising a dedicated reporter for Suffolk as well.

DVCam, you having a laugh aint you? Why are we regressing from one good formats such as DigiBetacam, D1 or D5 (these two if you are lucky) to DV?

Beat me, The Mailbox in Birmingham is having HD soon.

EXTRA INFO: When I was at the Lincolnshire Show, I got chatting with Roger Farrant, overall head of Look North Hull, and he told me on good authority that Look East's East and West versions were indeed splitting fully from each other. Look East effectively 'doing a Look North'.

I think the split will mean the following:

EASTERN SHOW: To be broadcast on Tacolneston and Sudbury transmitters plus their respective relay transmitters. Broadcast base would be new building in Norwich

WESTERN SHOW: To be broadcast on the Sandy Heath transmitters plus relays at Dallington Park, Luton and Kimpton. Broadcast base would be Cambridge.

Sorry - think you are confusing things. BBC News have never used D1, D5 or DigiBeta for acquisition or editing, though current affairs have and do use DigiBeta.

DVCam replaces Betacam SP, which itself replaced a combination of UMatic HiBand and 1" in News and Regional News.

The improvement of DV as a tape format over Beta SP - especially when kept native (or SDI) when edited either linearly or non-linearly - is still noticable. Beta SP, especially when shoved through analogue PAL mixers, was truly awful - DVCam is an improvement over this... I'm not suggesting that anyone edits to, or TXes from DVCam, it is purely an acquisition and feed recording format - with editing and transmission from server/non-linear...

There is no way News budgets would cover DigiBeta, D1 or D5... (And SX is on the way out - now that IMX is available for the same cost and provides massively better results, along with DV and IMX format recordings on XDCam optical)

Of course non-News shows are still edited and TXed from DigiBeta (and the odd news show from one studio at TVC still uses DigiBeta for pre-records - but that is a different story )

Well I guess there will be quite a lot of spare, if clapped out, kit available to boost the resources available to Cambridge when the old BBC East HQ is decommissioned - though not in time for Monday!

The difference between Hull and Cambridge is that Hull is still broadcast from Leeds technically, so has access to the full Leeds graphics and editing facilities, as well as links to the BBC links network (TV Centre, Manchester etc.) whereas Cambridge is actually broadcast from a different regional centre, so would have to have duplicate editing and gfx facilities, and has very limited infrastructure to link the centre to the outside world. (I believe that Cambridge only has an incoming vision circuit when NORWICH is not opted out...)

It's all spin you know, Look East has always had dedicated Suffolk and Essex reporters - they're just talking up their new look!!!!!

By the way I am told their server based system crashes a lot - will make interesting viewing next week!!

All server based systems crash a lot (or at least individual bits of them) at the start. There will be teething problems galore until it settles down, gets tweaked and the users get to know its quirks. The reckon that 2 years is about the right bedding in period.

BTW the last programme from the old building is the 6:30 tonight, Cambridge are doing it over the weekend and have been doing 10:30s for several weeks

And it works perfectly well for that purpose - London and Tunbridge Wells have been using it for over 2 years now as well as archiving on DV .

Bear in mind, Howsey, that they will be using DVCAM (and possibly a bit of DVCPRO) and not MiniDV which is what you might be thinking of. Although MiniDV is used for VJ one-person film and edit material and occasions where a full DVCAM kit can't be used - it isn't the master format

Yep - though MiniDV and DVCam differ only in the audio recording options available, and the robustness of the recording format (Different tape speed / guard bands). The video recording quality is identical - both use 4:2:0 DV25 codecs in 625 regions. (DVCPro uses 4:1:1 DV25 in 625 and 525 regions) However the quality of the camera bits of the camcorders available for DVCam are MUCH higher than MiniDV domestic stuff...

Howesy -- out of interest - how many D1 camcorders have you seen???

(Not sure how many 625 non-HD D5 camcorders there are either...)

I wouldn't know because I'm not in the TV industry. The only cameras I have ever used are HDCAM and a few Digi Betacams.

I do also know the difference between DVcam, DVpro and miniDV as Iused to have a DVpro recorder, sold it for a DVHS one though.

Are you joking? Has this happened before?