Regional Pres Desks

I dream of the day Ceefax music is on Spotify

I said that out loud didn't I

Yes, but I can't judge you because I'd long for the Channel 4 interval music to be on Spotify or elsewhere!

Sometimes it's surprising what crops up on iTunes if you know what you're looking for!

Was one the GNAT, and the other the digital successor to it? (I can't quite remember if it had a snappy acronym for a name).

Just showed that video to a few colleagues, and they could name quite a few folk featured in it - some of whom are still working in pres or engineering these days.

http://open.spotify.com/track/2suXXpsLwJPbyRBaerH9qv

this discovery has made my day. and there are a whole set of them. I recall looking at the website for these and tsking at their £13 each price tag.

Not sure if it was GNAT or GNAT 2 but ISTR that the clock generator the BBC designed in-house at R&D in the late 80s/early 90s was CCIR 601 based internally so was "digital" at that stage? Whether it had parallel CCIR 656 I/O (this pre-dated widespread use of SDI) I can't remember.

Did the BBC ever run on-air clocks in an SDI environment - I though that the NTA was analogue PAL, and the clocks were removed from on-air use in 1998 when digital TV launched (and the DTA, and later MSA, areas came on stream) - and wouldn't they have been the first SDI playout-areas?

I think the NTA was Analogue PAL too. The DTA did have a clock generators but whether they were SDI or converted from PAL I don't know. It's possible I suppose that they converted the existing analogue clocks to widescreen and took a centre-cut-out ARC for the NTA (both NTA and DTA co-existed for a while, with separate analogue and digital teams - this arrangement ended in 2000 ISTR). There was certainly a clock made up for the Dancers era of BBC One but it never went to air.

Yes pretty sure it was. The tape format used, D3 was digital composite so even it they did it was PAL encoded video over SDI (which apparently was one of the now obsolete low bit rate SDI standards )


I always assumed they were different generators, but that could have been the case.


It was later than that, possibly late 2001/2, although the NTAs hours were gradually reduced from 1999


There was a BBC 'family' clock too but again that never made it to air

There was almost no PAL composite digital ancillary gear manufactured - unlike in the US where NTSC composite vision mixers were briefly available (Grass Valley made an NTSC composite digital desk, but it didn't get a PAL conversion ISTR) I believe that this was partially because component stuff was already taking hold with BSB and other broadcasters using component MAC for transmission, and more and more interest was already being taken in component kit in Europe.

So D3 decks (and D2 decks which were 3/4" Digital Composite using a similar tape format to D1 Digital Component decks) were mainly used as drop-in replacements for analogue 1" composite machines. The main benefit was that you could do a digital clone between two D3/D2 decks with no generation loss.

The edit suites at TVC with D3 decks in had analogue vision mixers in them certainly.

The sampling rate for D3 was 4xfsc which was around 17MHz - which was actually quite a lot higher than the 13.5MHz sampling rate for Digital Component (so in THEORY the luminance was sharper - and the Com3 system briefly used by OBs - Component Compatible Composite - had modifed D3 machines with wider filters) - but there was no need for 2 x 6.75MHz colour channels as the colour information was in the composite signal, so the overall bitrate was lower. There was a short-lived D3 camcorder - but because it was made by Panasonic, it had a pretty poor camera on the front of it, and the electronics needed a noisy fan for cooling etc. Beta SP and DigiBeta were more popular formats.

C4 standardised on the component version D5 when they went digital component in the 90s - but D5 never really took off (it was uncompressed SD component - as was D1) as DigiBeta (lightly compressed SD component) took off in 1994. D5 was combined with an HD pre-compressor to provide an HD VTR (aka HD-D5) which was popular in the US as a higher quality format than HD Cam (1920x1080 4:2:2 vs 1440x1080 3:1:1)

I very much doubt that they would have used decoded PAL 4:3 sources for clocks in the 16:9 DTA - so I suspect there were Component 16:9 models, and whether these were re-engineered GNATS (you'd need to be able to animate the hands in 16:9 shaped pixel land, though the background stores would have handled 16:9 FHA images as they were 601) or a new type I'm not sure.

The more I think about it the more I remember a discussion about clocks being installed in the DTA, but a decision taken not to use them on-air after a while. (Because digital TV rendered them inaccurate.... Of course so did the regions playing them in from Beta SP before the Six integrated regional headlines, and thus gained an opt-out regional clock announcement...)

However the DTA was on-air from Nov 1998 when DSat and DTT launched (and News 24 moved studios), and UK Today launched on DSat/DTT at that time (to fill the "digital" regional opts) The integrated Six launched in 1999 I think? So the DTA must have had a clock for BBC One then?

Did the clock die with the introduction of the dancers?

Yes, there was a clock for the Dancers era, but BBC One did not want to use it (although News expressed their concerns about being introduced over people dancing about - hardly seemed appropriate on some news days!) It was a blurred static from Capoeira with the red BBC One patch and clockface keyed over it. The compromise was that some of the slightly more downbeat dancers idents were deemed news safe (Acrobats, Skateboarders, Tai-Chi, Capoeira, ) and Ballet became the Obit Symbol of choice later. BBC South had a full set of Dancers idents branded BBC One South but AFAIK only the news ones were ever transmitted.

From memory, the background image on that clock had the red BBC ONE box in slightly the wrong place compared to the symbols.

In that case it must have been all analogue. Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I remember the lines up and down between the 2 transmission areas having D-A converters as well as synchronisers and ARCs.


There were definately on-screen clocks used in the DTA and were broadcast in 16:9 on the digital versions of BBC1 and 2. They only ceased to be used when the dancing idents were introduced, although of course I don't think that BBC2 had broadcast one for years before that.

The 16:9 clock appears on the beginning of the first clip from 2001 on this page of TV Ark here: http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/news/bbcnews/evening.html

of course, on the first day of the Dancers idents, a still of Ballet was used to introduce the news reports of the Queen Mum's death.

On an entirely unrelated note, I found a D3 machine sitting in the old DTA kitchen the other day.