Click here for a list of Abbreviations, acronyms and general jargon used in Tech Ops during the golden age of Television.

This page gives some explanation behind some of the terms in that list.

Roger Bunce

I remember an apparently intelligent Camera Crew once baffled by a shot description. It was a drama and there was a character called "Ashburton". The shot description read –
MRS Ashburton

"What’s an MRS?" cried the Crew. "A Medium Right Shot?"

I fell to me to explain that this must be a shot of Mr. Ashburton’s wife – Mrs. Ashburton.

Bill Jenkin, Len Moss, Bernie Newnham

The camera people at Television Film Studios, (that is,  Ealing) felt highly offended by the term ‘indifferent’ or ‘inferior film’ in TARIF (Technical Apparatus for the Rectification of Indifferent Film).

It was not so much “inferior”,  but just probably due to differing times of chemical processing of the scenes as they were shot, or, indeed the setup of telecine. Generally the rectification was to a specific bias, say for example green in the blacks, and of course the electronic output of the telecine needed to be matched to the studio content. If you remember for “I Claudius”,  John Green, the LD, called for a specific colour temperature line up, warm, so that the engineers needed to pump in more blue gain to make the pictures cooler, thus giving an authentic Latin tan skin tone. If  there were film inserts but they would have required a similar TARIF look, not rectification of inferior film, per se, but simply changes to match studio content. So no need for the Ealing editor guys and gals to get upset with us at Tech Ops as often they would be present in the lighting control room and offer instruction as to colour quality. Not that we necessarily listened as the LD or Production Director always had the final say.

And of course 16mm film in those days was actually quite poor  and no amount of matching with the studio pictures was going to fix grainy film that wobbled through the gate.   Of course the studio people didn’t necessarily do an amazing job – all early colour studio material looked like it had been shot next door, rather than have that feel that 35mm did of being slightly somewhere else.  This was fine for current affairs etc, but really bad for “Portrait of a Lady” or “The Spoils of Poynton” or whatever.  And in Pres,  when  shooting props in the studio,  the engineers needed to turn down the contours (Link term) to make a less lifelike picture. They weren’t happy.

Mike Giles

DAC as an acronym comes from the fact that I often put invented expressions or abbreviations into specs and planning documents, on the basis that if people didn’t query it, it proved they hadn’t read the piece thoroughly. DAC was in the VISA spec and referred to the fact that  matrix cross-points should be permanently blocked to prevent the Director’s mic from being fed to speakers in the production gallery, for the avoidance of howl round. 

I remember using BLINK on a diagram and not a soul asked what it meant – BbcLocalInformationNetworK. 

Alasdair Lawrance

Van Halen and brown M&Ms. “…David Lee Roth was no diva; he was an operations master. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention—whether they’d read every word of the contract and taken it seriously…”