[Tech1] MOTD - and all that...

[Alan Taylor]

Commentators instinctively want to have line of sight at the event, but many come round to realising that a suitably equipped off-tube commentary can be very satisfactory and even offer advantages. I did a series of rugby matches for S4C and they always had two commentators, one in Welsh, the other in English.  Some of the smaller grounds didn’t have much space for commentators and on one match, a commentator was positioned about six feet behind a camera in a booth with solid walls either side.  I thought he would make a huge fuss when he saw the commentary position with no view of the pitch, but he was quite happy and pointed out that the camera and cameraman would shield him from the biting wind.  He said that on cold days, off-tube commentating was his preference and that he would especially welcome it if the video and audio circuits could be piped to his house. 

It was a good call choosing Glensound to make the gear for the MICR.  They are a company who listen to users and try to improve their products in the light of the feedback they get.  Their gear is pretty reliable and generally suited to the abuse it gets on the road.  There are a few other companies who also take on board what users think and their products similarly benefit from feedback. 

I only made the most fleeting visit to the MICR as it wasn’t used on the type of shows I had much  interest in doing.  For instance, Wimbledon used 95% of the OB fleet for about three or four weeks every summer, but I only worked there about three times in a twenty year career. During much of the 70’s I worked on Seaside Special every year, which nicely kept me away from Wimbledon and once I found my feet as a sound supervisor, I did a lot of drama work which also meant being busy elsewhere during the summer. 

In my first year as a supervisor in ‘80 or ‘81, I did have to mix at Wimbledon and one thing which really surprised me was the way that outside courts coverage was handled by a collection of random small sound desks cobbled together with an obscene number of distribution amplifiers and parallel strips connected together with a rat’s nest of cables and adaptors.  Having been doing the house PA and monitor mix for Seaside Special for a few years, it seemed obvious to me that the requirements for covering the outside courts would be elegantly served by simply hiring in a large monitor mixer, offering lots of channels, but crucially a very large number of auxiliary outputs. All the microphones and feeds appeared on that one desk and any combination of sources could be fed to any combination of the many outputs.  Leigh Osborne was running a PA hire sideline at the time and he bought a massive all-singing, all-dancing monitor stage desk primarily with that role in mind.  It was hired for used use at Wimbledon the next year and for many years afterwards, proving to be a very profitable investment for him and a good solution for the coverage.

Talking of Leigh and Wimbledon, in the early 70s, he was SA1 and I was SA2 on the same unit.  We discovered that both our wives were pregnant and due virtually on the same day, which would be the second week of Wimbledon. Our lovely allocations lady, Grace, was warned about the prospect of us both needing simultaneous paternity leave during Wimbledon and was somewhat alarmed at the prospect of having to find replacements.  She joked that Leigh and I should have planned our respective carnal activities more considerately.  I pointed out to Grace that if she counted back 9 months, she had scheduled our unit to do a run of two or three programmes away from hone, culminating in the Burleigh horse trials for a week before being home for just one day before doing another show.  I pointed out to her that it was the inevitable consequences of her planning decisions.  She responded by saying that she has been accused of many things, but getting two women pregnant was something she never expected to be accused of.

As it happened, our two wives gave birth a day apart, just at the final weekend of Wimbledon.  Both of us were replaced by other staff, which meant that neither of us were there for the de-rig.  Our camera van, previously piled high with ill-gotten gains, stuff sneakily acquired from stores, useful things salvaged from skips, together with cables or gadgets we made, returned to base as a hollow shell with just the minimum basic load on it, while the camera vans of other units left Wimbledon laden with untold treasures. I think if we had realised how denuded our camera van was going to be, we might have decided to turn up just for the de-rig in order to get all our stuff back.

Alan Taylor

> On 12 Jul 2021, at 08:13, Hugh Sheppard <hughsheppard at btinternet.com> wrote:
> 
>  Ah well, Alan; what goes around comes around. As the manager of most BBC operations for visiting commentators in the '70s and early '80s, the debate about being on-site or off-tube is still all too familiar. Suffice that in 1979, BBC Engineering allowed me, as an ex-tech-op renegade, to sully the pages of its monographs with a summary of how the new Mobile International Control Room (MICR1) and its Commentator Control Units led the way for on-site standards adopted by the EBU's members for major events for a generation. Do see the attached from the BBC Eng. monograph no. 113 from 1979. 
> 
> See: https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/BBC-Technical/BBC-Engineering/bbc-engineering-113-OCR.pdf  for better quality, but 'tis a large OCR file. 
> 
> Even today If you take M F R McKee's description of the original units built for the BBC by Glensound and compare the company's commentary units on its website, you'll see how the operational initiatives of Presentation and Kendal Avenue met the commentator's needs and have withstood the test of time  As for off-tube commentary, so essential to meet the demands of scattered Olympic events for the less well-resourced broadcasters, let alone the breadth of requirements of international networks such as Sky, to have an observer at the ground with 2-way contact probably completes most of the elements for a full 'you are there' viewer experience. Of course, the need for interviews and to be in-vision argues for an on-site presence, but otherwise who would know?
> 
> When the BBC sold off OB's in 2008 in its folly, the £19m it received didn't quite cover all the contents of Kendal Avenue, so that both John Teather and I have a salvaged commentators unlt as a momento of those happy days. Of course, that paled 4 years later, when TV Centre went to the knacker's yard for just £200m. But rest assured..  the BBC Finance Director at the time was bound to have known the price of everything....  need any more be said? 
> 
> Hugh    
> 
> On 11-Jul-21 11:05 AM, Alan Taylor via Tech1 wrote:
> 
> 
> On 11-Jul-21 11:05 AM, Alan Taylor via Tech1 wrote:
>> It’s fascinating to see how technology can drastically change our industry.
>> 
>> Back in the late 1960s I started my career as a technical assistant, which was part of the engineering stream. I learnt to line up EMI 2001 cameras, using that impressive array of knobs on the CCU.  In conversation with Ron Gibbs, my vision supervisor, I argued that this was a prime task for automation because everything we adjusted was observed on an electronic display and was tweaked for a maximum, minimum or to a specified level.  I pointed out that if it was measured and controlled electronically, the task could be more easily automated.
>> 
>> “Not in my lifetime, probably not in yours either” he said.  It’s worth recalling that integrated circuits were still to come into the mainstream and microprocessors were unheard of in those days.  However, by the 1980s we were seeing cameras which could largely line up themselves.  I certainly believed it would happen, but never expected it to happen in just over a decade.
>> 
>> Paul’s description of remote operation is something which has been discussed and predicted in one form or another many times in the past, it seems such an obvious thing to do, but of course trying to do for real comes with tremendous technical and operational challenges.
>> 
>> Satellite links sounded promising, but years ago you would have needed loads of them to get that many signal chains out of the site, therefore I had expected that optical fibre was going to be the solution, which would also have reduced delays.  
>> 
>> I’ve spoken to many a commentator about the difference between commentating at the stadium or off-tube and many argue that they need to see the wider view of the match which is only possible in the stadium.  They also point to the need to do post match interviews in person.  The recent experience of having to work around Covid has forced people to try new ideas.  FaceTime or Zoom interviews are seen on TV every day. There’s no reason why post match interviews wouldn’t work in a similar video-call manner.  An off-tube commentary could be done using multiple screens as every camera would be available via a router, therefore the comm could simultaneously view the transmission coverage, a wide angle shot, close ups of the benches and still choose additional views. They could also have more room for their notes in a studio, particularly if commentary booths were made larger.
>> 
>> The obvious extension of that idea is that some of the less critical cameras could be remotely or even automatically operated.  The technology used to electronically track players on the pitch might also automatically point a camera at a selected player. 
>> 
>> There is one obvious drawback to having fewer people on site.  There will be fewer people available to do the rig and de-rig.  Some of the cameras could be smaller, which would help, but the lenses required to get the tight close ups are not going to shrink much, so there’s still going to be a lot of heavy gear to move around. Sound-wise and video monitor-wise it’s probably swings and roundabouts.  Fx coverage much as before but no commentary position. Prep and post match interviews could be slick video-call type operations with the same gear moving from pre-match pitch side to post match interview rooms. 
>> 
>> The most obvious problem is that you are putting all your eggs in one basket.  If the uplink fails, then what?  It might be possible to back up everything locally on a mega-storage system and retransmit when the uplink fault is cleared, but you still lose remote control while it’s happening.
>> 
>> It seems inevitable that this will become the way to do routine sports coverage.  A sports channel could use one central operation to cover three  live matches at 11:00, 15:00 and 19:00, all using the same system and crew it with two overlapping shifts.  Instead of a hundred people on site for each OB, there might be a little over twenty. Therefore on a day with three OBs, something like 200 fewer people would be sent to those stadia. It would be an accountant’s dream. 
>> 
>> I don’t ever see this working for big matches.  Apart from the technical limitations and risks, a major sports event attracts massive numbers of production people, together with various hangers-on, who insist that they simply have to be there on the day.  If there isn’t a big scanner to crowd into or a commentator to sit near, where can they go? Answers on a postcard please. 
>> 
>> Alan Taylor
>> 
>>> On 9 Jul 2021, at 17:14, paul at pgtmedia.co.uk wrote:
>>> 
>>> One of the 'new' ways to do this is to have Camera's, vision control, sound on the pitch & a sound guarantee, with a small truck at the ground, then bring all the individual cameras, mics etc back to a 'fixed ' control room /PCR. Typically you use 2 x UHD uplinks to bring back 8 (HD) cameras , with 32 audios.
>>> 
>>> Producer, Director, VM, SS and all the EVS ops, along with the off tube comms are all 'back at the main Facilities'  and do not go to site (Saving on travel, hotels etc)
>>> Delays, comms and tallies are the big issues as you might imagin.
>>> 
>>> Paul
>>> 
>>> Paul Thackray
>>> PGT Media Consulting Ltd.
>>> 07802 243979
>>> Mail; paul at pgtmedia.co.uk 
>>> Web; http://www.pgtmedia.co.uk
>>> Linkedin;   http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/paul-thackray/19/379/746
>>> IMDB; http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1488554/
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
> 
> <compressed_bbc-engineering-113-Pages 13-23 Cute.Sedja.pdf>
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