Tony Crake
Some time in the mid 1990s I was allocated to the Research Dept. HDTV OB truck with its huge Cameras and 4 x D1 VTRs ( locked together to record mixer out uncompressed!)
We just went to look at things like “Gardeners World” … (see Dirty Work) … then it got a bit more ambitious we went to a Trade Exhibition to supply pictures for Philips HDTV CRTs in Central London. We were welcomed by nice people who were pleased to see the truck. The "TVs" had no loudspeakers or tuners – just a polished box with the 28 and 32 inch CRTs and "video In". I got some LS3 and some LS 5/9 out of stores. The riggers took them down in a Land Rover!
The idea was the "Press" would be lectured by the "Men from Philips" and then there would be questions and then food and "drinkies" It all went well but the "Press" didn’t show too much interest in the CRTs ( they were of exceptional quality and resolution, but were to be the last of the line…before LED style flat screens took over) and they all wanted to know about the BBC Loudspeakers, of which I knew little!
It was an excellent day however by the time all the drinks had been consumed!
The next day out was TVC … I was there to collect and plug up audio feeds… Day 1 we were to watch "Blue Peter" being created and Day 2 "French and Saunders". However it nearly didn’t happen… As the "Scanner" arrived through Frithville, it attracted a whole flock of "Suits" who had dressed specially for the occasion!
Parking was supposed to be between TC 3 and 4, sort of in the Ring Road Area… Quite a lot of Cables for the riggers to get in. After an hour they had got nowhere! The Shiny Suits didn’t want the truck HERE or HERE or HERE … Cables were not to be slung across HERE or HERE etc and so it went on!
The Rigger Supervisor, a hard leathery sort of chap who has seen off many a better class of "Suit" suddenly decided, after an hour, he had had enough …
"Look Pal… It seems to me you don’t want this truck parked here. Unless you sort yourselves out in the next five minutes, its going back to Kendal Avenue and there it will bloody well stay! "
Consternation amongst the Research Dept. boffins … they had invited the DG to see the HD in the afternoon ! A "Sensible Suit" soon appeared and shooed all the other cretins away and the rig at last commenced… It could only happen at TVC!
There are other "OBs at TVC" stories but that is the only one I attended!
Peter Cook
I can vouch for these stories of the HDTV trials, having been present at a three of those mentioned plus Wimbledon. There were two cameras available. I thought that it was 3 VTRs not 4.
I have a vague suspicion that the trade exhibition was somewhere towards the East End.
The potential for cinema projection was already envisaged and the quality of pictures (and sound) I remember blew us all away.
I recall, at the “Blue Peter” demo, the OB camera crew was only allowed to help rig and not to operate. The Prom was an OB obviously and Chris Eames and I were on camera. A two camera shoot is easy because if the red light is not on you know that you are next! Also it was shot in relatively wide angle as the (then) stunning resolution allowed the viewer to see a lot of detail in a wide shot. I also recall that the cameras were set up at Wimbledon. It soon became obvious that the format and definition was ideal for sport.
On camera cables, "short end Eddie" was renowned for rigs where cables were a couple of feet short BOTH ends! It did happen more than once.
Tony Crake
Whilst waiting for the HDTV truck to be finally cabled up in the Ring Road, I casually asked one of the Research Boffins how all this stuff would get to our homes…. I rather wished I had not ! It was way over my head …. but I gleaned it would be for 3 Channels and radiated from a purpose built up- link in Newcastle ! I was about to ask how regional opt outs would work? At that precise point it was announced the truck was powered up and such cables as were required reached the studio floor…
Apparently Bill Cotton asked the same question some 12 months or so later … The answer was apparently you couldn’t! Not then at any rate!
It was 4 x D1 VTRs, as it gave you 16 Track sound capability… I never found enough sound tracks to keep the boffins happy !
Chris Eames
The vehicle in question was I believe part or the Eureka Project. This was funded partly or wholly by the EU, and consisted of an ancient scanner, ex Wales I think, equipped with two Phillips plumbicon cameras. These used 30mm plumbicons with the targets ‘shaved’ to increase the definition. Unfortunately, it also reduced the sensitivity somewhat.
I must confess, Peter, that I do not remember that particular Prom, but we did so many Proms that that is not surprising!
I do remember, very well, a week at Wimbledon (1991?) with the van. By then it had grown a third camera, a solid state device, with a superior low light performance. We were shoehorned into the old No1 court, the 2 plumbicons at one end. One high on the centre line , the other lower down and off centre to the right. The new experimental camera was down the other end, an almost automatic reverse cut, so was not much used because in those days people cared about those things!
I think that everyone who operated the cameras was impressed with the stunning detail in the picture. The main court camera was quite boring to operate because you could frame it wide enough to see all the action, but still see all of the detail. Unknown in those days.
The main problem was focus. The viewfinders looked very sharp compared with SD viewfinders. Also the engineers with their 32" monitors were reasonably happy with our efforts. However, when seen on the big screen shown to the public, problems could be seen. I remember having long discussions with the boffins about v/f definition, and size. Also throwing in ideas for auto systems. Of course, all of this was long before solid state screens, but has the problem been solved today?
We recorded on 4 D1 recorders locked together. This meant that to edit, each cut had to be repeated 4 times. I don’t think that much editing was done. Also we had a limited supply of tapes, I think that we could only record about 3 or 4 hours of material.
One advantage of the 1250 line system was that a 625 line picture fitted exactly into a quarter of the picture, so SD replays could be added to the output.
Another big advantage was with the relative insensitivity of the plumbicon cameras, by 18:00 (19:00 on a sunny day) the light had gone, and we were on our way home well before the crowds!
Dave Le Breton
In its original form, the vehicle was CMCR13, purchased from Pye TVT in the mid-1970s to meet an urgent requirement for more OB facilities in Wales. Pye had it “on the shelf” (though it had been robbed of its original cameras and vision mixer) and, as delivered, it had four Philips LDK3S cameras and a Richmond Hill vision mixer. The limited budget allowed us to make it a bit more “BBC”, including grafting two Pye sound desks together. Whichever mid-1970s summer it was, I spent a lot of time in Cambridge helping to make it happen.
Peter Hider
I’d love to know whether the following story of a new giant colour scanner is apocryphal.
The new scanner in the late 1980s (I think) was delivered to Kendall Avenue just in time for it to be used at Canterbury Cathedral for Christmas. The dimensions of the scanner were to within an inch of the maximum size permitted on British roads.
It arrived in Canterbury only to find that it wouldn’t fit through the outer archway of the grounds and as a consequence the riggers had to lay miles of camera cable back to the scanner parked in a road some considerable distance from the Cathedral.
The other OB story that raises a smile is that of the first excursion of an OB unit to Russia for a recording on a mobile VT truck of the Bolshoi ballet. The rig completed, the crew retired to their Victorian Intourist hotel where the two VT engineers were required to share a really ornate and grand bedroom. Neither had been to Russia before but were convinced their room was bugged. They searched the table lamps, the phone and the bathroom for bugs before one noticed a shiny lump under one of the beds. Being BBC engineers they proceeded to unscrew the shiny lump not long before the chandelier in bedroom under theirs fell off the ceiling.
I’d love for this to be true.
Dave Mundy
I was allocated to do a Prom in that HD truck which involved getting a feed of the main sound output from the normal scanner and fading it up! It was the easiest prom I ever did! The monitors were huge but the pictures were superb, 1250 lines, ie. better than the digital 1080 – Eureka! They had a 1250 line set in the main entrance of the IBC for the Barcelona Olympics and it was very impressive.
Dave Plowman
I’ve a feeling HD when it first started being broadcast in digital had a higher rate than today.
Probably like DAB. Start out OK then degrade it to the point where only less than 50% complain, leaving the door open to bring out super HD a few years later.
Nick Ware
More data compression equals more channels in the available bandwidth. More channels equals more advertising revenue. The one good thing about analogue was that you couldn’t compress it.
The first HD I ever saw was at Wimbledon with a German analogue truck, here for NHK. When they put an HD camera up on the Galaxy hoist, you could read all of the centre court scoreboard in the wide shot! Never saw HD that good after that occasion. NHK sent our HD output to Tokyo as three separate RGB feeds over three different satellite paths around the planet. How they timed and combined those in Tokyo God knows, but apparently they did!
Dave Denness will confirm that their Engineers in Tokyo were so techno-critical that they complained of a 14kHz ‘whistle’ at -30dB below peak level on our studio output. Eventually tracked down to a ‘singing’ lamp filament! Weirdly, production values didn’t seem to matter so much.
Happy days.
Chris Woolf
Pictures with timecode are remarkably easy to fit back together again. With each frame labelled it really is pretty trivial, in practice.
I think it was because sound got digitised in smaller, unlabelled chunks for CDs etc that the problem of fitting those chunks back in the right position against other sounds and pictures became the nightmare it is today. Yes, we have labels on the whole parcel nowadays, but not on the individual presents inside.
But who cares now? Whether lips move before or after someone speaks seems to have become irrelevant.
David Denness
Lipsync becomes even more problematic now that the pictures from an HD camera come out delayed by 20ms.
Chris Woolf
… But a fixed delay is not a problem. With digits we can delay everything else as much as we like.
The pain is variable delay on things like compressed links. Only an idiot would have thought up system where the amount of detail in a picture determined the accuracy of the lipsync.
David Denness
Yet further evidence that, in the world of television, Audio remains an afterthought: if thought of at all, it’s an inconvenience.
Dave Mundy
Here are scans of the Eng. Inf. dept. handout on HDTV, for those interested in history!
(Click on the pictures below to see larger versions:
use your Browser’s BACK button to return to this page)
Bernie Newnham
At IBC last year (2016) some company (Samsung?) had a huge screen about 5mm thick and 3m long showing some huge resolution, maybe 8k. All jolly good for exhibition halls etc, but I think it would be a bit scary in your living room.
These days I find myself, like all those young people, watching on anything. I really couldn’t care less if it’s HD, 4k, or whatever. Content, as always, is king. Do I like this show, even if it lags a bit or breaks up every so often? Yes, so I’ll watch. I have a limit, but it isn’t defined by any formal standard, and I think it was always the same.
Only manufacturers want you to keep upgrading, to keep their cashflow going. Mind you, I do have an nearly up to date phone, a OnePlus 3 (cost half the price of an iPhone and works just as well). But my computer – the processor and motherboard anyway, date back years. I put in an SSD for drive C: and it made such a difference I haven’t bothered to upgrade the basics. I go from playing Prey to editing on CS6 and don’t seem to need new stuff the way I used to. I expect the day will eventually come.
