BBC News New Look

Dave Plowman

At long last, BBC TV news seems to have gone over to head boom personal mics, rather than lapel. What took them so long? Perhaps the BBC had to buy a job lot for the Jubilee concert?

Mike Giles

Has news gone VR? It has that feel about it and if it is VR, I think they’ve over-egged the shadows.

Geoff Hawkes

I’m told there was a preview of the new setup at the end of the One Show this evening, given by Huw Edwards. I haven’t seen it but will watch it later on iPlayer.

I did see the ten o’clock news however and didn’t like the new style of presentation with more of it, interviews included, done in long shot with Huw wandering across from the news desk. I too wondered if it was VR but don’t know. I didn’t like the lighting or the increase in colour temperature which did Huw no favours,

Paul Thackray

It’s all real, not VR.

It’s the one studio at LBH that had real cameras with ops not robots and was used pre Covid for Newsnight. It’s now new robot cameras and no camera staff.

Robert Miles

Here is a ‘walk-around’ the new facilities by Huw Edwards – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-61785325

Geoff Hawkes

I thought it probably was real rather than virtual as it looked to solid but thanks for confirming.

Thanks for sending the link to the preview as it saved me finding it on iPlayer. I looked at it this morning and can’t say I share Huw Edwards’ enthusiasm for the new setup. They seem to want to make a big production with presenter walkabouts of what in essence is a newsreader reading straight to camera, with one-to-one interviews or down-the-line reports from correspondents thrown in.

It must’ve cost a lot with all the new equipment, and I wonder how they justified it unless there’s a cost saving element involved with it,

I heard something about them using new Scandinavian cameras, whatever they may be? I assumed they would be all robotic cameras (as I think it was before) but it’s better not to see them or the rails in shot. Are they still controlled by an operator, Radamec see-and-select style in the gallery or is it all run by computer now?

Paul Thackray

No camera staff going forward is an obvious savings. The press release talks about it being used for general elections etc. I am sure on paper, this is a saving over hiring another studio.

An accountant would deprecate kit over 5, 7 or 10 years. As LBH kit is now 10 years old, the accountants would say it’s of no value, so has to be replaced! You or I would say some kit is no issue for years more, other kit has been passed it for years!

The difference between bean counters and those that understand!

Bill Jenkin

I’m told the robotic system is called “Electric Friends” and it looks like tall pillar boxes moving around. https://www.electricfriends.net/

Graeme Wall

Cameramen will be eliminated, will be eliminated, will be…

Bernie Newnham

If they could just fix Mark Easton that would be good. No wonder BBC News gets a bad reputation for not understanding dispassionate reporting. He wouldn’t have lasted a minute under Ron Neil.

Nick Ware

It’s probably too much to hope for, but if they could fix whatever it is that causes the presenter mic to sound topless and unclear compared to much of the incoming stuff, that would be great. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care what fancy studio setup they have, it’s the content that matters.

But I daresay the new look is more a question of keeping up with, or ahead of the competition (other channels).

Barry Bonner

The bit of kit news is missing is called a “Sound Supervisor” unfortunately due to the extortionate costs of this latest licence fee spending spree they can’t afford one! EQ has also been dropped!

BBC London News are worse due to multitasking.

Hand-over from BBC National News to London News (my pet hate) at lunchtime today (17^th June 2022), first 3 minutes was in fact BBC Sport News! It then switched to London News halfway through an item, no apology forthcoming even at the end. So I assume that the “Off Air” monitor has been ditched! Presenter obviously not aware either.

Pat Heigham

You are so right, Barry,

Get the bean counters to turn off the sound and see how much they get to understand.

We spent many hours learning how to engineer good sound, from basic mic positioning, with respect to muffling, wind blasting, consonant blasting etc.

How many single person cameramen know about this?

I attach a discourse which I had forgotten I put together with input from esteemed technician

Dave Plowman

What I can’t understand is it doesn’t take ‘golden ears’ to hear the difference in a voice between a decent mic in front of the mouth and a decent mic on a lapel. Or much skill to match them as closely as possible.

Imaging the rows if they positioned the cameras so close it distorted the face due to a very wide-angle lens? We expect the camera so show us a face as near to reality as possible. Why should sound be different?

Graeme Wall

That’s been one of my complaints for many years now, the over-use of wide-angle lenses too close to the subject because the person on the camera [1] can’t cope with focus any other way.

[1] I hesitate to refer to them as cameramen/women!

Chris Woolf

I’m not entirely sure that a lot of the editors/producers actually listen.

Like picture editors and directors of dramas, they kinda know the scripts, so already have the content in their minds – they don’t need to hear every word, and therefore don’t recognise the problem.

Without pre-knowledge, perhaps with limited lip-reading due to poor sync and non-optimal viewing distances, and frequency-limited speaker replay in a non-optimal acoustic space…. the audience doesn’t get anything like the intelligibility they need.

Intelligibility of audio everywhere is not a value that is even recognised. People say it isn’t loud enough, or someone is mumbling, but gross distortion on poor phone lines, syllabic muting and similar faults that prevent the actual transfer of useful information – not even the terminology is available.

I had to discuss pension matters on the phone the other day, and the line quality was abysmal. I’m quite sure I only managed to get about 30% of the details. Of course the call was so that the pensions co. could absolve themselves of responsibility for me making a wrong decision – nothing to do with actually communicating anything useful. I didn’t care because I’d asked them to email everything anyway. But if I’d needed to communicate for a medical emergency etc, it would have been disastrous.

Dave Plowman

Something else I’ve not quite worked out. Zoom etc usually has quite passable picture quality but poor-ish audio. You’d have thought decent audio would take up less bandwidth than the vision?

Pat Heigham

Poor audio on Zoom?

Where’s the bl**dy mic?

On the computer – miles away from mouth!

Alec Bray

When I first went into IT working with Paul Whitehouse, we were at – or nearly at – the bleeding edge of networking (we didn’t package in big red boxes like Novell….). I was involved in trying to trademark our networking technology – called the Advanced Networking System or ANS.  Couldn’t get it trademarked as there is a town in Belgium called ANS and of course that would cause total confusion – not!

Around 1990 there was great interest in voice over the internet. At that time there were two major systems X.25 and IP.  X.25 was European and Connection Oriented – that is, you sent a packet of data, the recipient replied that that data packet had been received, and then you sent the next packet.  Each packet went through 7 layers of processing before being presented to the user. IP – the Internet Protocol – was American and connectionless – that is you banged off a packet and hoped it got to the recipient: in fact, you banged packet after packet only limited by the low-level technology such as Ethernet.

At that time – I must stress at that time in the 1990s – there was a great discussion about transmission of voice over the internet – and in particular about Voice over IP.  Basically the sound stream has to be broken up into packets, and these packets of data handed down to the network.  There was great discussion as to what would happen to sound if the recipient lost – or lost track of – packets of data – hunks of sound would be missing.  Sound is delivered and received sequentially, and missing parts usually cannot easily be interpolated, so you might hear something like this

"I wen....oo...eh ..oooo to see th...  ..ion"

.

(On X.25 the packets would have to be resent: “I went to the zoo to see the lion” at the cost of delays).  The Internet Protocol only had 4 levels of processing and was inherently much faster (at the cost of accuracy) – and was American – so you got the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) — and lots of other things including VoIP all running on the Internet Protocol.

Pictures are not quite the same – what is transmitted is the difference between one frame and the next so if you missed a few packets just some of the picture would not be updated and you may not even notice (unless there was a lot of whizzy action…).

Now all of this is of course a long, long time ago (aeons for IT) and I certainly have not kept up to date with all the changes – and surely there must be myriads – by 2000 I had moved into software configuration and change management, a whole different ball game!

Alan Taylor

I don’t think the issue is to do with data bandwidth, but with limited bandwidth devoted to thinking about engineering the sound.

When I used to live at Newbury, one of my neighbours was an engineer at Quantell.  He was once telling me how proud they were to get so much video processing done in just 125msec, which was near enough instantaneous as far as they were concerned.

I asked him if they automatically delayed the sound by about 4 frames too.  That was the first time that he had been told that if the audio were leading the video by 4 frames it would be a big problem.

Hugh Sheppard

In the very dim and distant past of 50 years ago, BBC Studio Capital Projects were commissioned by the heads of Planning and Presentation (Charles Lashmar and Rex Moorfoot) to build a computerised mixer for Network Control.  For 2 years, Mac McKee and others of R & D expended blood, sweat and tears until the day dawned to bring the prototype into NC2 for a trial. 

To paraphrase Alan Taylor: ‘That was the first time that Mac had been told that…:  …while the regular network transition from one vision source to another was a cut (this in the days of frame roll) the sound transition relied on faders, as in ‘lead sound and cut’. The pallor on Mac’s face was exquisite…  ‘Oh no’ he said, ‘you can’t do that’!  It took about another 6 months before you could. 

And they STILL can’t get it right.  That’s why WE at home have to control the audio level from one programme to the next, and not THEM at White City.  Bring back Pres. CONTROL.

Alasdair Lawrance

As a mere pointer, I do get frustrated at the poor voice quality of many programmes.

I have three particular gripes.

The weekend news opt outs on BBC 1 in the Midlands are often done by the daily weather forecaster, Shefali Oza.

We often watch the paper reviews on the News Channel and the quality of some participants is appalling, near untransmittable and the picture is equally cr*p. Shameful for a national Broadcaster.

Speaking of regional opt-outs, we still don’t get the regional news in HD. Is it too much to ask?

Peter Neill

There was a policy that regional opts would only happen when they could be done on all platforms (this would involve an additional 12 HD Satellite channels).  All regions would be done together.  And they would be true HD not upscaled SD. This would involve re-equipping all regional studios.

A huge cost for less than 1 hour a day.

ITV HD isn’t much better. Here in East Anglia we gut upscaled SD from the South Coast.

There is now a rethink of that policy so, watch this space.

Hugh Snape

I suppose I’m being a curmudgeon, but I find a lot of the shots rather odd, some make the studio look as though it’s in the middle of a rig / de-rig. The weather shot is also peculiar. Showing the floor and the weather person’s feet makes the map seem smaller and there’s an odd “dingy corner” camera left. I presume pretty wide-angle lenses are being used as when there’s a two shot throw to another presenter, or the weather, the latter look to be miles away. All the above, in my opinion, distracts from the main business of the programme which is news.

Geoff Hawkes

“Hear hear” to Hugh’s comments and those of others too.

I don’t like the new presentation with all those wide shots and Huw Edwards wandering about. The opening with headlines on that tall, portrait format screen is very odd and looks gimmicky. The main presenter shot with a semi-transparent white band to left of screen – what is that and what does the designer think it adds to the picture? Huw Edwards’ face tones look pale, unhealthy and washed out, not warm as they should be, particularly at this time of the year and some of the lighting looks too steep, giving him eye shadows where there shouldn’t be.

Having the weather done in wide shot seeing the presenter full length throughout is not good and detracts attention from the weather map as it seems more about what he/she is wearing and whether it fits than the business in hand.

At least the main presenter no longer holds pages of the script, pretending to be checking details from it when everybody knows they are reading off the prompter, not miraculously memorising it and delivering it so precisely.

I hope that apart from us Techies who can see the glaring flaws, I wonder what Tunbridge Wells will have to say, or even Mrs Trellis of North Wales…

Alasdair Lawrance

And another thing….

Just watching Brian Cox on BBC  2 about the. Mars rover Perseverance, and they’ve succumbed to the annoyances of the outer reaches of Freeview with an irritating sound and vision sting on edits and fx for slo-mo sequences.  What do these people think they’re doing?

Dave Plowman

Does there seem to be more of their fair share of sound problems – mics not working and splats etc – than before? Or just coincidence?

Mike Giles

I have to say that even as a sound man I have more concern about the pictures ~ they’re awful!

Hugh Edwards didn’t look good, but Sophie Raworth looked haggard, and I can’t believe any of the presenters would consider their appearance acceptable.

It’s an absolute dog’s breakfast and the shot of all the regional presenters waiting dutifully for the big cheese to finish just about sums up the whole ill-conceived presentation. And why did we need to be reminded that weather people have feet?

Hugh Snape

Each time the news presenters do their funny walk at the end of the programme before throwing to the regions I worry that they’re going to bump their heads on the spiral staircase; it’s a real dog’s dinner . . .

Dave Newbitt

Not to mention the chance of a base over apex on the step!

Geoff Hawkes

Sorry to all you discerning Sound people but I haven’t registered the poor sound quality that you have, even listening on our Bose Soundbar, so it’s good to read your comments.

As a cameraman who worked on the Ten O’clock news on BBC1 when it was in N6 at TC, I thought the studio setup on the news at NBH was bad enough with cameras in shot and the poor eye lines on interviewees at the main desk, but the new studio setup is, as Mike says “awful” and well described as “a dog’s breakfast”.

All the wandering about that the presenter does and the throws to contributors in deep wide shot, then doing interviews with them in full length when we need to see their expressions. The same with people including the weather presenter seen in full shot at the screen, it gives the viewer the impression that we are looking on from a distance when the natural thing we want to do is to move closer to see their faces and expressions. I can’t believe that anyone in News thought it a good idea or allowed themselves to be persuaded to go for it, let alone Huw Edwards who claimed in the preview to be “very excited about it.” Has he seen what the lighting does to him or Sophie? I’m sure Mrs Edwards would tell him if not, just as Terry Wogan used to complain that his wife had commented when the lighting on him didn’t look good on his chat show.

What a relief when last Saturday evening the News at Ten came from the old studio, presumably because there was no BBC London News which needed it. I was hoping it would be the same on Sunday evening but sadly it wasn’t, as the regional news was back.

As I said in my last message, I wonder what Tunbridge Wells will have to say about it in the Radio Times feedback column, or even Mrs Trellis of North Wales on one of the comedy shows?

I doubt if it will make a scrap of difference whatever the consumers say, as the News chiefs will simply ignore it and carry on, as with the main character in the news today despite what happened at the polls yesterday. [Ed: two by-election losses for the Conservatives: 23^rd June 2022]

Apologies if I’ve strayed into forbidden territory with that comment.

Dave Newbitt.

Strongly agree, Geoff, as indeed I do with all the adverse comments on this thread.

My observation as a viewing customer rather than an informed insider is that it is another example of a general trend which has gathered momentum down the years. The trend I see is for a desire right across all media, advertising and general ‘lifestyle’ promotion to overstate, overdo, design to death, over hype, generate synthetic excitement where little exists and overall make the vehicle more important than the message it is carrying. Glossy magazines nowadays have to have pictures anything but square to the page, overlapped randomly in collages which are usually a mess rather than aesthetically pleasing. Copy has to overlap pictures, often with font colour barely distinguishable from picture background colour. One could go on and on but the reason as to why is what I would love to see addressed. Many times where I have seen coverage of ‘around the table’ meetings discussing art, graphics, presentation etc. my feeling has been one of 90% pretension, 10% professional input.

Our forum (I speak not for myself but for the rest of you) is a prime example of a source for almost unlimited specialist knowledge, experience and outright ability in a field which has impacted our society in an almost unparalleled way. The voices holding sway however choose not to seek out and embrace that utterly professional approach to the material they are responsible for, choosing instead what they think is glitzy, eye-catching, cool and shot through with “look at me, look at me”.

I am sure we are not just grumpy old men, there is real substance to so much comment from many members. It may be whistling into the wind but please don’t stop!

Vernon Dyer

Yes, I agree too. It’s all very similar to what Sky News did about 15 years ago. The effect, then and now, is to diminish the status of the presenter, and the size of the graphic on your home screen is exactly the same, however big it is in the studio. Lighting is of necessity very frontal and flat, and as someone has already pointed out you lose the subtlety of facial reactions of interviewees, not that you’re on their eyeline anyway (this is in theory a separate issue, but it seems to go hand-in-hand with the general “style”).

Oh well, that’s progress for you.

Dave Plowman

It wasn’t poor sound I was commenting on, Geoff, but mics not working at all on what I assume is a new installation.

Talking about awkward looking shots – the way Newsnight forces the presenter to look over their shoulder at the screen when a remote interview is on takes some beating. There must be a better way of doing it.

Dave Newbitt

There have been a number of comments recently as part of colleagues’ appraisal of the “News at 10” set up. Full length weather presenters in well pulled back shots don’t generally seem to have gone down too well. I have been entirely in agreement until this evening when, were it not for Stav Danaos appearing top to toe, I would not have realised that winklepickers were back in fashion. So as an education for us country hicks, the new format serves a purpose!