[London Lite]

As mentioned, they've resolved the lighting issues by the sofa. But the comparison of Paul on the sofa to Paul in the explainer area of the set is completely different. Much paler in that corner.

I'd also add by the tower where the sports presenter was also didn't look well. It showed up where she put her make up on, but otherwise was pale.

Yet compared to the Vaseline era of Look North, it's still a vast improvement.

[Steve in Pudsey]

Interesting that there is no vision mixer console in Amy's gallery picture, just what looks like a bash box and the automation.

Will there still be a separate pres gallery? I guess even if the main gallery can be operated by a single person it might be worth keeping it for resilience/DR purposes?

[Mike]

I assume it'll all be disposal unless any parts might be needed for an urgent replacement until they've been upgraded - isn't the plan for all or most regions to have received the same upgrade?

Yes, unless a region's kit is literally failing there will be no desire to swap it out I'd expect.

Just because Leeds' older gallery looked modern it actually wasn't, it was still 20 year old hardware, just the monitor stack was replaced with a multiviewer and LCD screens presumably because new CRT preview and reference monitors are very hard to come by.

The only reason Leeds had animating astons was they got on the Caspar bandwagon, which was a product trialled in the Midlands to see if it could replace the ancient Aston hardware that was standard faire across the regions, primarily because they were all on their last legs and it was felt not reasonable or necessarily viable to source older hardware that was the same. After all the Caspar boxes that provide the animated astons in some regions, and all the animation on the new sets, are just normal PCs that output to SDI/HD-SDI and into the mixer - would it be worth moving that box to another site when it can just be set up on a new machine if required.

The rest of the Leeds gallery was still a GVG Zodiak mixer, standard sound board seen across all the regions of a certain age and Quantel ServerPlay automation which I'm not even sure is still a thing and still runs on XP hardware.

Animating astons while something people on presentation sites seem to love, is only a thing because it's pretty standard now - as long as the aston can still do it's job who cares if it bounces out of the bottom of the screen, flashes and animates off and on etc.

[harshy]

Well the previous graphics did animate just didnt animate fluidly and the bbc look north logo looked like an 8 bit graphic, all that thankfully is a thing of the past for Leeds.

[London Lite]

Paul Hudson has done all three bulletin forecasts live today. Have to say I think the lighting was a lot better for the late forecast.

[Mike]

Well the previous graphics did animate just didnt animate fluidly and the bbc look north logo looked like an 8 bit graphic, all that thankfully is a thing of the past for Leeds.

Yes, the previous (as in until today) CG hardware/software was a CasparCG solution which replaced an Aston Motto or similar.

Thing is Caspar can look good, but the deployment at Leeds in particular seemed to suffer from some kind of awful distortion, and the animation was fairly choppy (suggesting that it was trying to render the captions on an integrated GPU or similar).

With the new Ross Overdrive+XPression+Graphite solution the CG is a dedicated crate with a fairly powerful GPU (they were 4070s) within it and a Blackmagic DeckLink card, and is outputting as HD to HD rather than the Caspar solution which was most likely rendering (badly) at 1080p, and then being downscaled either before or at the GVG Zodiak mixer.

[harshy]

Yes, the previous (as in until today) CG hardware/software was a CasparCG solution which replaced an Aston Motto or similar.

Thing is Caspar can look good, but the deployment at Leeds in particular seemed to suffer from some kind of awful distortion, and the animation was fairly choppy (suggesting that it was trying to render the captions on an integrated GPU or similar).

With the new Ross Overdrive+XPression+Graphite solution the CG is a dedicated crate with a fairly powerful GPU (they were 4070s) within it and a Blackmagic DeckLink card, and is outputting as HD to HD rather than the Caspar solution which was most likely rendering (badly) at 1080p, and then being downscaled either before or at the GVG Zodiak mixer.

Thanks Mike that’s a terrific explanation :-)

My question since all the regions are getting the same HD upgrade say if central control wanted to update the graphics all the regions can receive the updates via some sort of firmware update ?

[Spencer]

I was disappointed to see the blue tint to the output from the studio remains, despite the change in gallery and HD upgrade.

Incidentally, I think it was @peterrocket who had suggested it was the entire image that had poor white balance, not just the video-wall screens as I'd previously thought. Having seen some iPhone shots of the studio on social media looking absolutely fine, I'm now very much in agreement.

Here's a capture from last night, and an attempt by me below of quick bit of white balance adjustment of the image for comparison, and to show how it could look.

   

[Mike]

Well given the cameras were upgraded before the switch to the new gallery, I'd guess the CCU wasn't touched as it was assumed to be okay hence why it remained as shown.

[harshy]

Well given the cameras were upgraded before the switch to the new gallery, I'd guess the CCU wasn't touched as it was assumed to be okay hence why it remained as shown.

i think its the camera next to the tower that has blue tint yeah the white balance must just be set to the cool side.