The TV Question Amnesty Thread

I'm not sure vertical video will become mainstream for domestic viewing - as our living rooms are better suited to wider TV aspect ratioss not taller ones.

Netflix and Prime video commission a lot of 2:1 aspect ratio (i.e. 16:8 ) content these days I think and 21:9, which is a similar ratio to Cinemascope or similar wide cinema standards was a serious proposal pushed by Hollywood (and you could - and may still be able to - buy 21:9 or similar TVs).

However do Netflix commission 2:1 because the letterbox bars look cinematic? If TV manufacturers switched to 2:1 - 16:8 displays, would Netflix then go to 16:7...?

I think we're probably going to have 16:9 for a while yet.

(Little known fact - the BBC's 405 line service didn't start 4:3 - it was actually 5:4 initially. They switched to 5:4 sometime in the early 50s ISTR)

April 3rd 1950.

Ref PDF page 5 here
https://www.americanradiohistory.com/UK/Practical/Television/50s/Practical-Television-1950-05.pdf

There has been quite a bit on other threads but could someone say more about how adverts & promos were handled in the 70s. I understand that adverts were edited together and played off a 35mm telecine. Presumably the various adverts had to be reassembled for the next day tying up one or more cutting rooms.

How were short promos and moving company idents handled? Would they also be spliced into the reel of adverts?

I remember watching Day by Day, Southern's regional news programme in the 1970s and there there were a lot of short film items to handle - Southern moving ident to start with, opening sequence, lots of short piecess for the news bulletin before longer film reports. The latter could each be handled on a separate telecine but I doubt that it would be feasible for the shorter items. Again would they have been pre-edited?

I know that a number of the ITV companies purchased cassette tape recorders in the mid 1970s (see link). It suggests that they could handle more than one cassette at once. Also how long did they take to line up?

http://www.digitrakcom.com/literature/ACR25.pdf

I've also got a couple of questions about the transmission of films most of which would have a much wider aspect than the 4:3 used at the time. How was this dealt with, were they pre-edited by various companies who would decide what part of the picture to crop, would it be done by one ITV company for the whole network (although films were generally not networked at this time) or did the film distributors provide the broadcasters with 4:3 versions of their movies?

I presume that ITV companies in particular might have had to edit movies for length and both broadcasters for 'taste & decency'. If so was this done in a cutting room or would they have been transferred to tape first?

What exactly was the role of a “loggist” at a TV station? I understand that every broadcast event would have to be logged in case of legal implications later, but how much detail would this go into? For example, would a breakdown or “late roll” be logged, including how the station dealt with it? Would every word an announcer ad-libbed (or otherwise) be typed up? Or - if the station’s output was recorded and archived for so long, was the job more about filing these tapes away and “logging” where to find them?

Some production teams would have loggers, on reality shows like Big Brother for example, where they'd log when things happened to make them easier to find for the edit. I did a bit of it on work experience, shortly after Euro '96, having to go through tapes of matches logging timecodes for everything so clips could be sold on (including any shots of players in front of advertising hoardings in case the sponsors wanted them!).

At TV stations it's not a role I'm familiar with, I don't know if it's something that existed in the past. In Playout the directors would log any outages or incidents as they arise but how it's done and the severity of what needs to be logged varies from broadcaster to broadcaster.

Back in the day the quality of pictures and any operational issues were logged at each manned transmitter site. I can't remember the exact story but I read an anecdote of somebody thinking they had got away with a cock up of some sort, but an engineer at a remote tx site had mentioned it in his log.

I hope I can help you with some answers to your questions.

Adverts. From the 50’s to the late 70’s these were pretty much transmitted direct from telecine. A days commercials would consist of around 12 reels or so each holding about 20 mins worth. They would start to arrive in telecine from around 9am and would continue to arrive throughout the day generally up to around tea time when the ‘operation’ should have been completed. These were collected first thing the next morning and the reels would be broken down to the individual commercials ready for re-splicing later that same day. Each commercial lasted less than a dozen transmissions before it was junked and replaced by a fresh copy. Each reel of film commercials was previewed for technical quality and compliance as they arrived in the telecine area.

The film/commercial section consisted of about 4 people who assembled the commercial reels or edited feature films etc as required.

In the late 70’s commercials generally moved over to video production techniques so machines like the ACR that you pointed to came to the fore.

Short promotions were played to air generally direct to air from ACR type machines. Sometimes trailers for local films would be transmitted live from telecine. In this case the ‘trailer’ would be the film wound down to start of the trailer start point and then marked up very VERY clearly with a China graph pencil as to where the start of the trail started. You would load the spools of film on the telecine very carefully and it was somewhat ‘fraught’ with danger. (The ‘system’ meant that when the spools were returned back to the film department the next day for later actual transmission included a reminder to rub off the Chinagraph pencil marks - the ‘system’ didn’t always work with embarrassing consequences). It was unusual to transfer film clips to ACR as the VT machines were generally tied up doing other work, but it was done on occasion if the film clip formed part of a more complicated promo for say two or three programmes.

I’m pretty sure Day by Day’s station ident was rolled in directly from the ACR machine. The opening titles or ‘tits’ as they were referred to, came along on two reels with the title teasers in alternate sequence and the vision mixer mixed or wiped between the two reels that were obviously on two 16mm machines. The space between individual clips was filled with a generic Day by Day filmed caption so that there was always something to ‘go to’ in the event the sequence went wrong.

Company idents. Generally played in directly from telecine, but could have been the ACR machines if convenient to do so. 50/50 I would say. If you were working with a studio production the ident would certainly be provided from a telecine machine as you couldn’t tie up a very useful and flexible machine like an ACR all day just to provide a 5 second ident into a studio once or twice a day!

Good link to the ACR 25 machines and the literature very accurately describes its functionality. Line up would be once a day per machine and 30 mins would easily cover it. The equivalent RCA machines were called the TCR100 and had similar functionality but came before the ACR which were more advanced operationally as they were newer in terms of design etc - as you would expect.

Feature films. In my time films were generally supplied as 4:3 prints but we did have the occasional wide screen print. Each ITV company did their own thing though that altered from the mid-80’s onwards if I recall. You’d put it on the telecine a few weeks ahead of transmission, rehearse it and make notes for the poor sod who had to actually put it out. Was generally ok but we did have a few ‘taking noses’ on occasion. If a widescreen film was very problematic then it would be transferred and edited on VT but that was not the norm at all.

All local feature films were previewed for technical quality and compliance. For compliance purposes the film would be previewed by the transmission staff in a small preview theatre. If a film had to be edited to a certain length then these transmission staff would make a note of the timings of where to ‘chop’ and the staff in the film makeup department would perform the actual film cutting. The bits taken out would be obviously put back in after the local transmission before the film was released off the premises.

That’s how it was where I worked. I dare say it was similar in principal if not detail around the network.

I presume you are referring to the loggists who sat in transmission along the transmission staff? Their job was to amend the previous-printed transmission log as to what was actually transmitted as opposed to what was supposed to be transmitted. So it would consist of accurate timings and placements. They would not log individual announcements in terms of what was actually said. Some would sit in with the transmission staff, some would drift away to their office - but always within sight and earshot of a local TV set.

The actual logging tapes were supervised by the master control staff and they ‘filed’ them, ‘files’ a bit of a fancy word for saying they were put on a shelf in CAR and rotated through for over-recording every calendar month.

That’s how it was where I worked.

Fascinating stuff. Were the additional copies of commercials duplicated in house or did the relevant agency provide multiple copies? I'm guessing a duplicating facility may not have been available given the precarious way you describe film trails being done.

I'm surprised about idents being played in from telecine thinking of the BBC preference for mechanical models to avoid tying up an expensive machine to play them out, but I guess in ITV it was possible to splice them into the adverts reel? Were the prints of the idents regularly replaced too?

The staff at the local IBA control room would grade the technical quality of each programme’s sound and vision (not including commercials) on a scale of 1 to 5 in half points. So, 1,1.5,2,2.5 etc).

An MCR engineer at the local ITV station did the same thing using the same grading structure. Once an evening (maybe once during the afternoon too?) the IBA engineer would ring up the ITV MCR and ask for the gradings given to a selection of random programmes. You would tell him what you gave it, he would tell you what he gave it and you were supposed to agree to within half a point. If you didn’t there would a gentleman’s discussion about it but it was always very amicable. A live studio tx would always expect to get a pair of 5’s - let’s face it, you can’t get technically better than unadulterated live sound and vision. Perhaps a studio recording would expect 4.5 and so on. A bit of ‘rough’ 16mm might scrape by with a pair of 3’s but nothing should ever be below 3’s or there could be serious questions asked as to why an ITV station was transmitting technically substandard material. Ouch!

I don’t think the IBA engineers were interested in operational cock ups, there would have been other avenues to pursue that sort of thing (Presentation etc).

The Ad agencies supplied as many copies of the film commercials as considered necessary for the particular campaign. These were always absolutely tip top accurately graded prints. You were ‘forbidden’ to colour correct commercials during transmission - if a commercial had a colour cast to it then it was assumed that’s what the agency wanted and you were not to interfere with it - nor the sound levels. Most of the comms had compressed sound to try and stand out so we always limited the peak sound level to 4 on a PPM meter to try and ‘contain’ it.

Each commercial had a 10 second printed freeze on the end of it. This was left untouched if the commercial was the last one in the break. But if the commercial was placed somewhere within the break then this freeze was chopped off and put to one side. When the film reel was broken down the next morning the freeze would be spliced back on. This splicing operation resulted in a single frame of film being ‘lost’ hence why the life expectancy of a commercial was technically limited - you could only lose so many single frames.

Idents. From memory most BBC idents suit a mechanical model but thinking about it I can’t think of many individual ITV company idents that could be so constructed. Idents were supplied on 35mm film, they were never spliced together with commercials - unless you are thinking of the very short idents that some companies used right at the start of a commercial break and sometimes in between individual commercials. Referring back to my earlier point about splicing etc that would become a very expensive operation!

Idents were replaced very infrequently and only as they showed signs of wear and tear. You never, never, ever, ever stopped a rolling telecine machine if it was in the middle of a commercial or ident, doing so would risk scratching the print for reasons too complicated to go into here. If you did stop one you were likely to be invited to a meeting in the station engineer’s office without tea and biscuits.

Thanks bluecortina - the loggists in pres were what I was referring to above - but very interesting to hear about those at the transmitter sites too.

As for films, I’m surprised that when edits were required, the master print was actually cut and spliced (and then the missing parts reinstated after broadcast). I had assumed there would be an edited copy, but I forget the logistics of working with film and not VT. I assume there were occasional cockups and some companies received films that were incomplete or wrongly spliced back together?

The film “masters” we are talking about - I assume they were supplied to the ITV companies from a central library/company who acted as an intermediary between distributors and broadcasters? Or not. Where did they sit when nobody was using them? I’ve heard of companies like NFC or ITFC who seemed to be responsible for acquiring and/or editing imported programmes?