Please note: this follows on from CSO as History: see page Inlay, Overlay and CSO.
Jeff Booth
Agreed D3 wasn’t the best choice. Unfortunately when the choice of VTR was made for Stage 5, Digi Beta wasn’t ready.
Ian Hillson
Even when the first TVC studio went digital (TC6) they still installed D3 to record locally – they made several other mistakes in TC6 (all part of its history, I suppose!)
John Hoare
You are talking about the studio I love!
I was Tech Co-ord for “Live And Kicking” in TC6 for its last few years. We were 4:3 until quite late because of all the cartoons we played in. The official rule was D3 for 4:3, digi for WS but (largely because she could buy digi tapes more cheaply) the Production manager specified digi when we were 4:3, plus one D3 for replay – no problems, just minor damage to the engineers backs (and occasionally mine!) getting the machines in the racks.
The only serious machine failure I remember was when a dirty digi tape clogged up a machine a couple of minutes before it was needed – VT loaded a different cartoon into another machine and Zoe Ball had to stop Jamie Theakston half way through his introduction and say she had an alternative cartoon as a special treat for him!
Incidentally, we had really brilliant studio engineers who with little muttering added all sorts of weird facilities which are mainstream now (local hard disc recorders, internet connectivity, ARCs all over the place)
I think the D3s were the least bad solution for a time when digital distribution was not established and analogue component distribution between studios and post production would have been a complete nightmare. We did quite often record cleaned up B-Y to a separate machine for CSO.
Dave Jervis
I think I am right in saying that Digibeta was only launched around the same time TC6 re-opened. With all the editing and distribution geared to D3 it would have been necessary to use that format anyway.
Jeff Booth
No reason why D3 should be used for 4×3 as digi beta is quite capable. The only issue I have with digi beta is that the internal PAL decoder is allegedly pants.
I don’t think there are any D3 machines in use any more at Red Bee. Everything is now digi beta or SR.
John Hoare
It wasn’t any technical problem, just an ‘ad hoc’ decision probably to keep the D3s in use! But it did help avoid mistakes during the transition from 4:3 PAL to 16:9 digital. There were even widescreen programmes made using an analogue transmission chain in the studio (TC3?). They didn’t look great when converted back to 14:9 PAL.
For use in studios the requirement for D3 or digi was just a matter of booking what the production wanted, although the machines were forever moving around and the engineers must have wished that they were bolted in. (If anyone wonders why this is relevant you never tried lifting one!)
This was all fifteen years ago (from 2014), of course. Time flies!
Bernie Newnham
Back when I was making trails we moved over the years from 2" to 1" then D3. With the analogue formats, keeping generations to the minimum was essential otherwise the pictures would get too furry to use. More than once we got as far as a six machine edit. On the arrival of D3 all that went away, even though everything was still in PAL. We’d dub back and forth through an analogue mixer and the generations seemed to change very little.
Jeff Booth
Don’t get me wrong. D3 was great as a PAL format. The issues were with machine to machine interchange (mechanical alignment and tolerances etc.). Not every tape played on every machine. As machines get more and more scarce, the problem is exacerbated.
Chris Booth
When D3 was brand new we did the ‘bouncing ball’ test in Edit Suite C with a D3 and pre read. We gave up around 16th generation – boredom, not picture degradation.
The signal system was very clean compared with C-format – when we did our first line-up from VT in Barcelona (Summer Olympics 92) we sent a still frame of bars; once accepted by the studio rather than ‘cut for ident’ we just ran the machine, raising some eyebrows!
Ian Hillson
And back in the 2" days Ampex would seem to play most tapes, but RCA were happier with their own – hence banished to News and the Regions…
I seem to remember, on my first visit to Dickenson Road (as a lad!) for “TOTP”, seeing that well known (amended) "Someone isn’t using Amplex" advert stuck to the wall next to the TR-22 (?).
Mike Jordan
I know from my old boss in OBs – who was on the “how to archive” panel – that their first concern was that there were not enough 2” head blocks in the world (or so it was thought – I saw a very old machine in Kenyan TV in about the late 1980s when doing the Africawatch show but looking very sad and broken) to keep playing those and so at the time, the only choice was 1”. Of course then people thought that Digital was the way forward for professional use and so things were dumped again.
Now they are using LTO (?) tape which actually stores the digital bits in a non-format way and, as this recording mode is used for Computer archive, it is hoped that the players will be available for many years to come.
One of my old colleagues at OBs is now working in Perivale checking over the dubbed versions before throwing out some of the old worn-out tape stock.
I got quite a few little perfectly reuseable DV tapes from the skips at Brentford Film library before it closed from amongst loads and loads of skips filled to the brim with 2” and 1” tape spools!
I heard from News crews once that they were very concerned as, nowadays recording on SD cards in cameras, these are sent to base and then back to be re-used and all archive is lost. Whereas at least with tape, it was kept for a while. They now carry Digi tape cases filled with foam and slots cut to store the SD cards!
