Qi on Dave

Watching Qi, on Dave, on Sky at the moment, it appears that there is something wrong with the picture. I can't quite work out what it is. Maybe some frames missing?

Yes, missing fields I reckon . It looks similar to when a programme is made to look like film, except this will be accidental.

There used to be a regular problem with 4:3 shows ingested into the BBC's servers, where an ARC had been left in "Film Effect" mode and interlaced shows were pillarboxed AND film-effected...

Yes, most notably on a Christmas Day repeat of The Two Ronnies (although that was being played direct from tape through an ARC, not a server)

I don't think they would ever have made something 'film effect' in the playout area it was more likely a dodgy setting, either someone fiddling or it going back to some sort of default

I've noticed that several Rory Bremner era Mock The Week episodes also seem to have had the filmic effect added to the episodes as well for some strange reason.

This is not true. An ARC does not have the capibility to add any "film effects" and so not only was it not a regular problem but could not have happened and certainly would not have been allowed to transmit. An ARC only changes aspect ratios (Aspect Ratio Convertor) 4:3 programmes have always played out in full height 4:3 with the exception of childrens 4:3 material that is zoomed in to 14:9.

ARCs certainly can turn 50i into 25p. Maybe not all, but many can.

ARC's in the BBC transmission change do not. As I said earlier.

Yes, as I mentioned earlier, the odd time it did happen it was a fault with the ARC

Err - you've obviously never used the Snell and Wilcox ARC100/125/150s - some of the best ARCs on the market at the time they were produced...

The Snell ARC series, at one point, were the BBC's recommended route to convert 50i content to 25p (to add a 'film effect').

This was because they had a very clean temporal/spatial filtering system (so it used information from more than one field to do the scaling and thus generated much cleaner results when doing a 16F16 crop of a 12F12 source for instance) - and could do some temporal processing as a result.

Very high end programmes used Alchemist standards converters (SD "New" Doctor Who for instance), but for mainstream 'film effect' programmes the approved route was to use a Snell ARC in 'film effect' mode (and not actuall to ARC anything)

AIUI Snell ARCs were also used in some ingest areas at the BBC - so that 4:3 content could be ingested in 12P16 mode for playout (as I believe at one point the BBC playout areas worked on the basis that anything on a server was a 16:9 raster - so 4:3 content had to be pillarboxed on ingest - not on playout)

Yes, when everything was at TV Centre, the output of each 4:3 VT machine fed directly into an ARC before going onto the router. However normally though the 4:3 material would be played direct from tape and not ingested but it was still converted onto a 16:9 raster.

What make they were, I'm not sure, probably Snell