General Presentation/Logistics Questions

And the loop played by the News Control Room at Television Centre has all three of those terms listed on it's soundtrack! "This is the Clean Feed from BBC Television News in London. This is the IFB from BBC Television News in London. This is the mix-minus circuit from BBC Television News in London".

Clean Feed gets you by in most circumstances. However I've found when training up sound operators, "Mix-Minus" is actually quite a good way of describing what sound mix you need to send to a contributor - it's literally everything you're transmitting except the contributor themselves. If you don't give a contributor a proper clean feed you can end up with some spectacularly bad results on-air. Very often a dodgy earpiece feed will be delayed (quite considerably in some circumstances) and if the contributor can hear themselves back in their ear you'll get slurring, slowing, and, at worst, unintelligible nonsense.

What a nice post, thanks. I immediately understood your point and, given your comments about human perception of sound, it's a wonder why anyone in radio wears headphones at all.

Watching HardTalk a few days ago, Zeinab Badawi's guest was remote in New York, as opposed to in the studio with her. She conducted the interview via a screen on the news wall. So, in this case, Zeinab would only have heard the guest via her earpiece, or would the guests sound have been played loud in her studio via speakers? If it's the former, how would gallery speak to Zeinab if the guest was already in her ear?

Also, a programme like HardTalk probably runs for 24 minutes end to end. How much actual content is taped, allowing the 24 good minutes to be extracted? Do they stop and do re-takes during the recording of a programme like this, or do they just allow the presenter to run (errors and all) and then sort it all out at the end?

Spurious and curious. Thanks in advance.

When I was loosely involved in Hardtalk many years ago it was recorded to time. This I assume was purely because there wasn't the time or the budget for doing lots of post production.

However they did record multiple copies of it (onto tape in those days) - a main and 2 camera ISOs (one of the presenter, one of the guest). Assuming it went fine the main went out without tinkering. However if there was a problem they'd fix it in an edit and this is where the ISOs came in handy.

I assume it's fairly similar process now, albeit on server.

Thanks, Inspector. But forgive my ignorance: what do you mean by ISO?

ISO is short for isolated.

It's basically just the recording of the output of a single camera. So in the case of a 1 on 1 interview in a studio you might record the mixed studio output and a few ISOs - for example the camera pointing at the guest, the one pointing at the interviewer and a wide shot. That way it can be recut if need be.

I guess this is the same problem that radio stations have doing post-match football phone-ins from the ground, I remember hearing one presenter getting frustrated that he couldn't hear what the caller was saying because the studio were talking to him.

Stumbled across this whilst on Twitter a few moments ago. (An Owen Thomas' eye-view of his newsdesk as he prepares to anchor his final news bulletin on BBC World, before leaving to join Bloomberg in a few weeks).

Anyhow, BBC World don't use that "pod" at the weekends, so I wonder why that set is fully lit, even when not in use??? (the plasma backdrop is live, as is the flying saucer above the pod, as is the underfloor lighting inside the "baking tray". Surely it must be quite expensive to activate all that lighting if it's not going to be used?

Furthermore, what purpose does that vertical red perspex panel (centre-right of the image) serve? It never appears on screen, IIRC.

http://twitpic.com/4jb2yc

None of the studio lighting is on though, which is what uses the electricity (and generates all the heat). The few bits of flourescent tube / neon in the flying saucer and rotrum proably pull less electricity than one of the spotlights above the set. Besides, compared to the power draw in the rest of the newsroom, it'll only be a tiny tiny fraction of the cost.



Looks to me like it's just there to mask off the corner of the set, normally in case someone / or a camera isn't in quite the right place it's better to have a plain bit of set appear than a pillar full of cables or a pile of rubbish.

Perhaps those lights also come on with the rest of the set - after all, it was all one set when News 24 were in there and it's probably just one switch to turn the whole of the 'tube' lights. The 'flying saucer' as you call it, was (and I assume still is) actually attached to the rest:

http://www.stuartearl.com/photos/news_24/img_4293.html

In this day and age of "Newswalls" and "BARCO" screens, etc, it is rare to see the old traditional "drop-in" being used on the news any more (I may not use the correct terminology, but what I mean is that small rectangular image that one used to see over the newsreader's shoulder, that actually wasn't there, but was generated fakery.)

Anyway, I believe the current BBC World set would benefit from having such an option, as a nice parallel contrast to the use of the "newswall", or whatever they call it. (The previous N9 set adopted this for the Asia Today brand). Why not use "drop-ins" against the current glass backdrop? Is it very expensive to do?

On the subject of Asia Today, I saw the first edition this morning (0730hrs SIN / 0030hrs LON / 0330hrs DXB). Sharanjit Leyl presented from the usual studio, but against the window and the outside darkness of Singapore, the backdrop looks absolutely terrible. It doesn't have any appearance whatsoever, except to look like an old blackboard with a piece of glass on top of it. (I am not describing this very well, but perhaps someone how has previously captured it from screen could post it here and you'll see what I mean.) They could liven it up a bit by dropping in some shoulder graphics? If this was the case, would the graphics be generated and dropped-in from London, or would there need to be a facility in Singapore to do it regionally? Is this programme actually directed from the London gallery?

Likewise, BBC World and CNN, plus many other outlets, now use Plasma screens for the presenting pods and stations. Rather unimaginative, is it not? The BBC World pod just has that loop of floating images in he pod area, not really adding much to the story. Why not actually run the story theme on those screens, or use graphics?

Using a plasma (or projector) as part of the set might appear to be a bit cheap, but it's a flexible and quality option as well as being affordable (regions use one or two projectors within their sets - much cheaper than a wall of BARCOs which network use. It achieves a broadly-comparable result though isn't as flexible. A wall of Barcos costs a fortune, one or two projectors within a set of back-lit PBUs is a lot cheaper).

It's easy to route any video source in your matrix into an on-set plasma. You don't even need to do it from the on-air vision mixer - any off-board vision mixer can be used to feed the plasmas while the main desk is used to make the programme. You can just about get away with not using a vision mixer at all to feed the plasma - just route what you want when you want it to the screen (thought his does mean changing it in vision might not be an option!)

Keying images over a presenter's shoulder is slightly more complex as it involves proper vision mixing and requires more attention to detail when framing the shot. It also looks rather fake these days - it's probably just a fashion thing - it may well return into favour. It was still pretty common-place with the Lambie-Nairn beige sets that the BBC had in the late 90s-mid 2000s (they usually had plasmas on-set and beige flats onto which images could be keyed - directors would usually request graphics to make a plasma or a 'window'/ 'inset' depending on local terminology used).

Although, they tend to look quite bad, East Midlands Today for example; keeps getting worse.


I quite liked the 1999 Beige sets but looking back now; they look disgusting. The old logo over shoulder things used to look particularly bad in the Midlands, as the fade used to make it part of the wall looked like someone was shining a bright light at the wall:
http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/bbc_midlands/bbcmidlands_images/news/midlands_today_latenews_2000b.jpg
http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/bbc_midlands/bbcmidlands_images/news/midlands_today_late_b.jpg

(Note the second shot is a CSO, at the time BBC Midlands had a mock window made up of two plasmas rotated 90 degrees to the ground http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/bbc_midlands/bbcmidlands_images/news/midlands_today_2000c.jpg)