Sky News: how much of it is pre-recorded?

I can tell you that the overnight staffing is just PA, Director, TD (engineer), Betacart, Sound and Producer (who may not always be in there.)
Full crewing operates from 6 am to midnight, with the others being Autocue, Aston (text producer), Graphics (playout and design), Cameraman (robotics), Sound (2), TD (racks engineer), Lighting, Vision-Mixer, Floor Manager.

The red slugs are made in graphics so have to be grabbed and stored by the evening vision-mixer. Any new stories overnight won't have any available, so 'NEWS' is the default one which the director may use.

The supers on VT's are always done live, called up by the PA on the Chyron caption generator. The exception to this is the overnight 'Sports Belt' which is usually a wholesale recording of the 2320 output.
The chyron also offers a 'Breaking News' style super which can mimic the aston, without the animation.

Finally, the overnight presenter operates their own autocue with a foot pedal.

I forgot to say recent months have seen ongoing night-time building maintenance going on, so the live midnight half-hour is often played out back to back by Transmission until 0530.
I imagine they rely on this recueing in the intervening commercial break.

Do Sky News Transmission not have access to disc servers? This would allow instant re-cue, or playout from multiple server ports?

Interesting that Sky News still runs with far higher staffing levels than News 24 overnight.

News 24/World overnight run with Director (who also vision mixes, operates remote cameras, plays out astons over interviews, and runs server playout), Sound (who also lines up outside sources), Autocue and a Producer in the gallery.

There is also the possibility of getting maps and other simple graphics commissioned from a designer I believe (and played out by the director)

Sky News TX do have a Profile server in their automation, but, as far as I know, this is only used for idents, commercials, promos etc.
Flexicart or a stand-alone VT is used for programme playout.

Antipodean midgets?

from what i have been able to infer, the slugs are not part of the caption/aston/strap, but added seperately...why is this?

why does transmission playout the idents? why are these not played out from the gallery?

You're right, the slugs are separate to the supers/captions. This is so a different one can be made manually in graphics to be relevant to each story. On the vision-mixer, we put 2 keys on at once to make the super; i.e slug plus the chyron.

The aston (text producer) has an ambiguous policy where some of their straps/captions have only the 'NEWS' slug on them, which we have to cover with the relevant slug. Their output hardly ever has story relevant slugs already on it.

As for TX (transmission), I was being a bit generic; in the current format, the gallery play the idents usually and TX take the studio output at about 15 seconds before the top of the hour. This is because the ident does a 'chromakey reveal' to the opening headlines, which, along with the connected music bed, can only practically be done if that whole sequence runs from the studio.

When the overnight bulletins are recorded, TX play a 'clean' ident themselves, then cut to the recording of the bulletin at 00. This recording would start with the first headline VT showing.
You could argue that the recording could start with the normal chromakey ident - yes, but I'm guessing that they don't for timing reasons - it's probably easier for TX to work out timings based on '00' rather than '14 or 16 seconds to .... '

By the way, I'm well aware any comments like above may well breach the 'non-disclosure agreement' I had to sign as a freelancer.

Ok .... bring it on !!!!!

thanks for the info fernando.

where is the gallery in relation to the studio? on the trailer for sunrise, it looks like it is infront of the studio....

Yes, the gallery and studio are adjacent. If you were sitting at the presenters' desk facing the cameras, you would see the gallery behind through a large glass window.