TV Live Forum

Day after Prince Philip passed away and ITV had a hiccup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSUxqY6dCiw

itvblocks post_id=7133 time=1618601265 user_id=888 Wrote:Day after Prince Philip passed away and ITV had a hiccup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSUxqY6dCiw

This should be nominated in the world records for quickest transaction from the moment something went wrong to the breakdown slide. How on earth did ITV knew there was a breakdown happening so fast?

Breakdowns with ITV Weather usually happens straight away like that. Always seems to be the same issue with the Greenwich Data Centre slate.
Pres will see the Weather isn’t there on standby before it’s broadcast but still need to play the sponsorship sting where automation will then automatically go to the feed where the Weather should be, before Pres will cut to the Breakdown slide.

RDJ post_id=7151 time=1618604758 user_id=831 Wrote:Breakdowns with ITV Weather usually happens straight away like that. Always seems to be the same issue with the Greenwich Data Centre slate.
Pres will see the Weather isn’t there on standby before it’s broadcast but still need to play the sponsorship sting where automation will then automatically go to the feed where the Weather should be, before Pres will cut to the Breakdown slide.

Though of course coming off the Prince Philip coverage, in this case there was no sponsorship sting.

RDJ post_id=7151 time=<a href="tel:1618604758">1618604758</a> user_id=831' Wrote:Breakdowns with ITV Weather usually happens straight away like that. Always seems to be the same issue with the Greenwich Data Centre slate.
Pres will see the Weather isn’t there on standby before it’s broadcast but still need to play the sponsorship sting where automation will then automatically go to the feed where the Weather should be, before Pres will cut to the Breakdown slide.

We have to remember from the moment the DoE passed away ITV ceased to broadcast commercials and sponsorship stings. So maybe a last minute manual re-scheduling problem? The ITV and C4 news teams were making it up as they went along and were in constant contact with their respective transmission areas over talkback. Either way, it certainly looks as though the weather was not incoming to Chiswick and one might have thought Chiswick would be in manual mode to prevent the automation cutting, even momentarily, to a source that wasn’t there.

I used to say to gallery staff, “You see that picture on the preview monitor? When you press the button marked ‘Take’ that’s the picture that will go to air. You may not fully understand why, but it will”. Yet, still some would look at colour bars on the preview monitor, press ‘Take’ and be completely surprised when they transmitted colour bars. Such is life I suppose.

TIGHazard post_id=7191 time=1618611204 user_id=904 Wrote:

RDJ post_id=7151 time=1618604758 user_id=831 Wrote:Breakdowns with ITV Weather usually happens straight away like that. Always seems to be the same issue with the Greenwich Data Centre slate.
Pres will see the Weather isn’t there on standby before it’s broadcast but still need to play the sponsorship sting where automation will then automatically go to the feed where the Weather should be, before Pres will cut to the Breakdown slide.

Though of course coming off the Prince Philip coverage, in this case there was no sponsorship sting.

Bit similar to this, which I've posted on the original thread on TVF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiqyhrrB...=emb_title

The incoming lines and every other source can also be seen before they cut it to air, so they likely assumed that the slide would be gone by the time they went to air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9mOTNDh...mb_rel_end
Found this in my recommended after the last link

I gather that back in the day, when ITV was fully regional, ITN always feed black and silence to the network before their programmes, whereas other stations would send the VT clock or film leader. Transmission Controllers just had to trust that the news would appear at the scheduled time, which of course it almost always did.

Steve in Pudsey post_id=7234 time=1618640927 user_id=942 Wrote:I gather that back in the day, when ITV was fully regional, ITN always feed black and silence to the network before their programmes, whereas other stations would send the VT clock or film leader. Transmission Controllers just had to trust that the news would appear at the scheduled time, which of course it almost always did.

ITN was always a bit different for some reason. Sometimes it would be black and silence and other times it would be a clock. By ‘times’ perhaps I should say ‘periods’, it didn’t seem to vary day to day more period by period so perhaps it depended on what ITN were doing with title sequences or technology. Trust and professionalism factored a lot and ITN are a very professional company.

(If you were networking ITN you always tried to send the ITN clock but sometimes time was very short due to programming timings, I’m thinking of World of Sport finishing at an agreed time and ITN starting at an agreed time 10 seconds later - how to fit in a network hold for the end of WOS and show a sniff of the ITN clock).

Markymark post_id=6995 time=1618556756 user_id=1078 Wrote:

bluecortina2 post_id=6953 time=1618521618 user_id=1578 Wrote:

Curto32 post_id=6703 time=1618436877 user_id=1170 Wrote:Here is a breakdown from BBC 2 on the 10th April 1986 in which both sound and picture have problems during the programme Discovering Birds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvTVewNdXp8

Ah, a nice example of a head clog developing on a Quad VTR. You can see the four bands across the picture of the head becoming clogged giving less and less output as time goes by. In fact there are 5 bands* but you can’t see the 5th one because it’s ‘across’ the vertical picture interval where the all the important vertical picture synchronising info is so it’s pretty inevitable the VTR will become very unhappy. And so it came to pass, a miserable situation for whoever was minding the machine at the time.

* the four heads on a uk quad machine rotate at 5 times the field frequency, ie 250Hz.

Interesting too that the BBC were still playing out from Quad as late as 1986? .

Perhaps this was a repeat and that was the original format? I was still ‘messing’ around with Quad in 1986 but it was definitely on its way out then. Most definitely.

bluecortina2 post_id=7240 time=1618645899 user_id=1578 Wrote:

Steve in Pudsey post_id=7234 time=1618640927 user_id=942 Wrote:I gather that back in the day, when ITV was fully regional, ITN always feed black and silence to the network before their programmes, whereas other stations would send the VT clock or film leader. Transmission Controllers just had to trust that the news would appear at the scheduled time, which of course it almost always did.

ITN was always a bit different for some reason. Sometimes it would be black and silence and other times it would be a clock. By ‘times’ perhaps I should say ‘periods’, it didn’t seem to vary day to day more period by period so perhaps it depended on what ITN were doing with title sequences or technology. Trust and professionalism factored a lot and ITN are a very professional company.

(If you were networking ITN you always tried to send the ITN clock but sometimes time was very short due to programming timings, I’m thinking of World of Sport finishing at an agreed time and ITN starting at an agreed time 10 seconds later - how to fit in a network hold for the end of WOS and show a sniff of the ITN clock).

Were there any occasions when the ITN Teatime news was simply routed through the WoS gallery, then all the ITV regions needed to do was 'opt' away from network for those 10 seconds?

(Yes, I know only the BBC 'opted', ?)

TheMightyTRex post_id=6195 time=1618253887 user_id=1275 Wrote:

Bennyboy84 post_id=3802 time=1617892653 user_id=1348 Wrote:https://youtu.be/msBrszqKfec

In this one the weather computer decided it would like to be upgraded to Windows 10!

thats someone not having Active Directory and the policies set up correctly (if at all) it was disabled in corporate use if set correctly - you would think as its something shown on the air - and need to be connected to the internet - they would have set it up right.

Weather Computers typically are not connected to the corporate network or use a VLAN. Many may have a dedicated internet connection given the amount of data coming in from the NWS.

Markymark post_id=7312 time=1618661383 user_id=1078 Wrote:

bluecortina2 post_id=7240 time=1618645899 user_id=1578 Wrote:

Steve in Pudsey post_id=7234 time=1618640927 user_id=942 Wrote:I gather that back in the day, when ITV was fully regional, ITN always feed black and silence to the network before their programmes, whereas other stations would send the VT clock or film leader. Transmission Controllers just had to trust that the news would appear at the scheduled time, which of course it almost always did.

ITN was always a bit different for some reason. Sometimes it would be black and silence and other times it would be a clock. By ‘times’ perhaps I should say ‘periods’, it didn’t seem to vary day to day more period by period so perhaps it depended on what ITN were doing with title sequences or technology. Trust and professionalism factored a lot and ITN are a very professional company.

(If you were networking ITN you always tried to send the ITN clock but sometimes time was very short due to programming timings, I’m thinking of World of Sport finishing at an agreed time and ITN starting at an agreed time 10 seconds later - how to fit in a network hold for the end of WOS and show a sniff of the ITN clock).

Were there any occasions when the ITN Teatime news was simply routed through the WoS gallery, then all the ITV regions needed to do was 'opt' away from network for those 10 seconds?

(Yes, I know only the BBC 'opted', ?)

Not that I'm aware of.

I can't see what difference it would make to a regional company where ITN was coming from so long as it appeared on their incoming feed at the agreed time? If you have 10 seconds to switch from a colour prod slide scanner in St3 to ITN on a Remote via St3 is it not the same as doing that in MCR as opposed to the studio? Not forgetting too that you'd be tying up a studio gallery and crew with all the costs involved in that.

bluecortina2 post_id=7433 time=1618675671 user_id=1578 Wrote:

Markymark post_id=7312 time=1618661383 user_id=1078 Wrote:

bluecortina2 post_id=7240 time=1618645899 user_id=1578 Wrote:

Steve in Pudsey post_id=7234 time=1618640927 user_id=942 Wrote:I gather that back in the day, when ITV was fully regional, ITN always feed black and silence to the network before their programmes, whereas other stations would send the VT clock or film leader. Transmission Controllers just had to trust that the news would appear at the scheduled time, which of course it almost always did.

ITN was always a bit different for some reason. Sometimes it would be black and silence and other times it would be a clock. By ‘times’ perhaps I should say ‘periods’, it didn’t seem to vary day to day more period by period so perhaps it depended on what ITN were doing with title sequences or technology. Trust and professionalism factored a lot and ITN are a very professional company.

(If you were networking ITN you always tried to send the ITN clock but sometimes time was very short due to programming timings, I’m thinking of World of Sport finishing at an agreed time and ITN starting at an agreed time 10 seconds later - how to fit in a network hold for the end of WOS and show a sniff of the ITN clock).

Were there any occasions when the ITN Teatime news was simply routed through the WoS gallery, then all the ITV regions needed to do was 'opt' away from network for those 10 seconds?

(Yes, I know only the BBC 'opted', ?)

Not that I'm aware of.

I can't see what difference it would make to a regional company where ITN was coming from so long as it appeared on their incoming feed at the agreed time? If you have 10 seconds to switch from a colour prod slide scanner in St3 to ITN on a Remote via St3 is it not the same as doing that in MCR as opposed to the studio? Not forgetting too that you'd be tying up a studio gallery and crew with all the costs involved in that.

Yes, fair points. I was thinking more of the pre frame sync days, and having to fast genlock to a new source. The ITN tea time news was a pretty brisk affair back then, less than 5 mins, bit yes still tieing up St 3 resources

Markymark post_id=7446 time=1618677959 user_id=1078 Wrote:

bluecortina2 post_id=7433 time=1618675671 user_id=1578 Wrote:

Markymark post_id=7312 time=1618661383 user_id=1078 Wrote:

bluecortina2 post_id=7240 time=1618645899 user_id=1578 Wrote:

Steve in Pudsey post_id=7234 time=1618640927 user_id=942 Wrote:I gather that back in the day, when ITV was fully regional, ITN always feed black and silence to the network before their programmes, whereas other stations would send the VT clock or film leader. Transmission Controllers just had to trust that the news would appear at the scheduled time, which of course it almost always did.

ITN was always a bit different for some reason. Sometimes it would be black and silence and other times it would be a clock. By ‘times’ perhaps I should say ‘periods’, it didn’t seem to vary day to day more period by period so perhaps it depended on what ITN were doing with title sequences or technology. Trust and professionalism factored a lot and ITN are a very professional company.

(If you were networking ITN you always tried to send the ITN clock but sometimes time was very short due to programming timings, I’m thinking of World of Sport finishing at an agreed time and ITN starting at an agreed time 10 seconds later - how to fit in a network hold for the end of WOS and show a sniff of the ITN clock).

Were there any occasions when the ITN Teatime news was simply routed through the WoS gallery, then all the ITV regions needed to do was 'opt' away from network for those 10 seconds?

(Yes, I know only the BBC 'opted', ?)

Not that I'm aware of.

I can't see what difference it would make to a regional company where ITN was coming from so long as it appeared on their incoming feed at the agreed time? If you have 10 seconds to switch from a colour prod slide scanner in St3 to ITN on a Remote via St3 is it not the same as doing that in MCR as opposed to the studio? Not forgetting too that you'd be tying up a studio gallery and crew with all the costs involved in that.

Yes, fair points. I was thinking more of the pre frame sync days, and having to fast genlock to a new source. The ITN tea time news was a pretty brisk affair back then, less than 5 mins, bit yes still tieing up St 3 resources

Genlock was a 'nice' to have rather than 'must' have. A full Genlock, from memory, would typically only take a few seconds at most, certainly less than 5. Maybe 3?