Regional Pres Desks

And the regions are unlikely to have any money spent on them unless they are moving.

The way things are going I can see BBC Midlands will soldier on with all their antiquated facilities until eventually Midlands Today falls off the air!

I'm pretty sure BBC East and East Midlands have had gallery upgrades even though they were brand new and exactly the same installations as the Mailbox (I think the Mailbox has a Pres Gallery though)

A really fascinating photostream on flickr - I spent a good hour or so flicking through it, doubtless I could spend more! Lots of wonderful photos from Pebble Mill at One, Saturday Night at the Mill, studio drama productions, and location shoots as well as a few of the radio studios. Really brings home what a busy centre it was in its heyday.

Bristol's original self-op pres gallery had the hexagonal, square, round buttons as noggin mentioned AIUI. It's later operator driven pres gallery (with presenter in a CSO studio) had an ingenious single fader for sound: all the way up for 'programme' sound (i.e. sound to accompany the vision source on-air), all the way down for presenter mic, and halfway for a mixture of mic and programme sound (i.e. for an OOV voiceover). It meant that the director could operate a decent (ish) vision mixer with the left hand and mix sound with the right - making decent bulletins a possibility as opposed to in-vision reads and a few stills.

Back in the days of BBC Choice NI, didn't the announcing team run self-op during their in-vision links?

Cardiff still have combined announcers/directors don't they? Where the con anno self-ops.

That's the case in Glasgow too - I think what Tony was referring to was the fact that continuity cuts up a (fully) crewed news studio for the news opts; rather than a presenter having to do it all!

Continuity Announcer/Directors are all still self op in Belfast too.

In days of Choice NI the invision announcer was just that, another announcer was in control of the desk.

Back in the old days of analogue we had no automation... just two beta machines, a desk which you could kind of programme a few sources and transitions in advance, an Aston and a Pic Box. Everything else came from outside sources and a dirty feed of BBC 1 and BBC 2 network. You also had to direct most news output from there too, while running next door to change trail tapes, cue newsreaders, run reports, etc... and do the intro anno to the news and a junction after it too!

Rubbing your tummy while patting your head never seemed so easy.

I always remember the joys (!) of the Saturday bulletin. Firstly hopefully remembering to put Wales on Saturday on OS3 so that you could line-up News TX 1 and 2 on OS1 and 2. Nothing quite like having TX1 on OS2 and TX2 on OS3! Then having the bulletin ready at the last minute and having to go through and programme the junction out of network news, the dreaded 'Breakfast with Frost' slide (meaning you had to run bulletin titles on a buzz as your mic was open), the whole of the bulletin and the junction out of it and back to network. In those days we had a regular Saturday bulletin presenter who did sport for Radio Wales, so never made it down in time to rehearse - sometimes only just in time to go to air....

There was immense job satisfaction, but looking back on it, it's no wonder I've got so much grey hair now

Yes - though the con anno has to 'do it all' for the channel presentation. ISTR that Cardiff ran like many regions, with short bulletins directed from a pres desk (with a combined sound and vision mixer) similar to the desks that the self-op panels drove.

Cardiff, Belfast and Glasgow were all equipped with the same type of Pro-Bel con desks around 1991/92 based around a 10 channel Grass Valley mixer. They were somewhat more complex than the English Regions self-op desks, but quite user friendly when they were functioning well. They had a sequencial memory function which would recall a series of sources and transitions - if you remembered to come out of Memory Rehearse and into Normal mode before the junction!There was no automation though, the transitions having to be executed by either the split paddle (if I remember rightly it was vision on the left and audio on the right) or the cut buttons, of which there were three: vision, sound and both.

The last of the Cardiff desks (Con B) remained in situ until 2007 when the room was demolished to provide extra bay space in the CTA. The desk was commandeered by the set designers for Sarah Jane Adventures, and became 'Mr. Smith'

Just slightly off topic: What on earth is 'Widescreen write down equipment'?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51154315@N04/5869535749/sizes/o/in/photostream/

It has a post PhONE day, pre 020 for London, number, so 1995 to April 2000, was this what ARCd the Mill's output?


[And ignore the 4 letter expletive written on the casing!]

Looks like that's several bits of kit - network recall so that London could take regional programmes off the air and go back to network if there was some critical regional news, and what looks like gallery monitor or camera line up.

Don't know what the stickers mean, but they're stuck onto standard Sony RCP (/OCP) panels - the panels that vision engineers use to alter settings in a camera - the rest of it looks like this:

http://i.ebayimg.com/24/!Bcpiom!!Wk~$(KGrHqQOKjoEq4+Z!DEtBK1,)OEMtg~~_35.JPG