The Question Time trail on BBC 1 immediately before tonight's 2200 News seemed to be very poor video quality - washed out, fuzzy, with the colour information on the BBC 1 "red box" noticeably out of position.
Anyone know why? The QT trails often seem to look ropey, but this one was especially bad.
I assumed that the trailers are made on location and probably don't have the proper facilites, they seem to look more professional than BBC Manchester's, but the problem with QT is that sometimes it's done in 16:9 and then 4:3 the other week, I don't know if they've done this for this series, but they usually do and confuse many.
I've just put QT on now and I am watching on analogue via Winter Hill and the quality of picture is awful, alá North West Tonight really, it's obvious it's not coming from London.
Question Time is commissioned via BBC Political Programmes - and it is/was fed to BBC Westminster at Millbank for potential editing prior to transmission. I believe the trail is a live playout from BBC Westminster - or is fed via there.
The circuits into and out of BBC Millbank are/were PAL not component, and the recording format is/was Beta SP. Combine these with dodgy PAL links to the nearest regional feed point on the BBC comms system to get the programme back to London and you end up with mush.
The Red Dot on the aston at the beginning of the actual programme was more of a red smear...
Interestingly the recent TV Centre Question Time was not mushy and horrid - so was unusually, probably, recorded/edited at TV Centre (on DigiBeta and fed via component links) I believe the BBC Four repeat (if it still happens) is higher quality - as it is from an on-site DigiBeta recording, rather than the as-live recording made at BBC Westminster.