Old TV slides

Which is why most stations ended up putting up only one or two slides in a junction, then cutting to either IVC or an electronically-generated programme menu screen

I've learnt more about the mechanics of (old) television presentation in just over one page of this thread than anywhere else on the web. Thanks to you all.

What I'm most amazed about is actually how basic everything was - and how much computers have changed things.

On a related point, on one of the Coronation Street DVDs from either 1971 or 1972, the Granada end cap is left on screen so long that the viewer can see the shadow of someone going to move the card it was on - and then it somehow lifts up to reveal the producer's name. Network Video are making a good job of leaving these bits in and around the programmes they are releasing.

I suspect these were photo originated, but stored electronically. They may have been grabbed into the still store from a slide-scanner, but the BBC was entirely electronic for its stills in network for play-out a long time before 1991 - I'm pretty certain of that. In fact I think they were upgrading from Quantel DLS (an early 80s system developed around the same time as the first Paintbox) to Quantel PictureBox at around that time.


In ITV regions possibly - however BBC studios - even in the regions - were getting the BBC-designed Rank-Cintel Slidefiles from 1983 onwards. This was a fantastic bit of kit - an electronic still store designed to appear similar to a slide playout system to the operator. They were dead reliable and pretty much standard issue in most studios from the mid 80s through to the mid-to-late 90s, when their large size and limited capacity did for them. Quantel PictureBox, Aston Concept and Pinnacle Lightnings were all likely replacements.

Yep - it may well be that electronic still stores were still filled with images grabbed from optical slide scanners (especially if network still distributed 35mm artwork stills, rather than stills on video tape to be grabbed, and they were unlikely to have bother with data tapes for the various slide file systems - which were no doubt incompatible with each other!) . The easiest way to tell the source of a slide on-air would be to see if the image had "frozen" or "moving" video noise - the former would imply an electronic freeze, the latter a live slide scanner play-out.

Until electronic artwork origination - using Paintbox and Aston etc. - was widespread, electronic still stores were often just used as more reliable ways of playing out a stack of slides, without relying on mechanical slide carousels etc.

I suspect they were equally as cost-conscious - designers and artwork cost money - especially before electronic systems...

TV pres -- particularly within ITV -- has only really changed significantly in the last decade or so.

Computers only changed the mechanics of things fairly slightly up to then. It was still static captions and individual tapes of trailers making up the bulk of presentation. Trailers were still being produced with in-line analogue edit suites at that time, with fairly basic graphics and voiceovers added "as-live" direct to tape. The procedures used in 1995 wouldn't have looked too out of place to a technician in 1985, just some things were made easier. Fast forward to 2005, and it's all utterly different.

There were still some cases of mechanical timepieces being stuck in front of cameras for station clocks, well into the 90s. It was rare by then but still happened.

I've mentioned this before, but the old basic approach is still in place in some areas due to the ease at which some things can be put together. In 1980, almost all programmes were cued with the aid of a non-computer generated VT clock. A technician would hand-write notes of a programme onto a small blackboard which contained a mechanical clock, which was then held in front of a camera, and the opening credits of the programme recorded from one tape to another as-live into the programme. Believe it or not, news trailers and weather forecasts from TTTV in Gateshead, despite being produced from one of the most modern centres in Europe, are still done in this way to this day. TTTV staff must find it quicker to bolt together these items than push it all through the computer.

Yep - though in my experience digital still stores were one of the first digital innovations (and in the case of SlideFile hardly resembled a computer at all. No keyboard or VDU - just an LED display and a numeric keypad with a couple of extra buttons anda fader!)



Yep - same was, and is, true of many BBC regions. Autocue made manual VT clocks with perspex fronts, that you could write on with a chinagraph or drywipe marker, and many are still in use. There used to be a great off-air grab of the beginning of a mid-90s Look East opening sequence, that was cut-up before it had run past its clock, where you could see the floor manager holding the green clock with a hand-written ident on it.

They are cheaper than putting electronic VT clocks into galleries, and much preferable to editing a VT clock onto a recording afterwards. (Though the argument for not putting a low-cost electronic clock generator into a new gallery is not as compelling as it once was, and it saves a camera...)

"Slides" were delivered on tape (tape!) to BBC NI until not long after I started working there in 1997. The old system had no way of searching for slides - the index system was a dry-wipe board, situated behind us. Oh the fun of realising you hadn't pre-set the slide and desperately searching a board divided into 150 squares for the right one with 10 seconds to go...

Didn't the transmitter sites often have slide scanners as well? To originate the Test Card and other such captions?

I loved Slide File! A really good bit of kit to use under pressure (assuming you did actually have the images you needed loaded in the first place!!!). No unnecessary complications and that simplicity made it really easy to change your plan half way through a junction if things were going "off piste".

They also had (very basic) electronic caption generators for in case they lost contact with the broadcast station.



I recall Tyne Tees had a rather novel approach to the fact that they didn't have a VT clock generator in the edit suite used to produce trails either (yes the station was run on a shoestring -- the edit suite's "monitors" were a set of old Ferguson portable televisions ). They had a tape recording of a generic, near-blank electronic clock which they'd front the trailer with. Of course this meant that there was no details on the recording, so they'd simply program the details into the Aston/caption generator and superimpose these on the clock, fading them out manually on the recording when the clock had run its course. Simple, but effective.