Press, 8 July 1970
It is a strange and fascinating world—as strange and fascinating, in its distinctive way, as any discovered by Jacques Cousteau; it is inhabited, principally, by people barely out of their teens; they use a strange language, consisting largely of signs and abbreviations; they live much of their time in dimmed rooms before screens and panels. It is the weird but quite wonderful world of television.
Each day, an army of technicians and artists battles to put a programme on scores of thousands of screens. It is no ordinary army. Its every manoeuvre is timed to the second: any failure to maintain this strict schedule, any break-down in equipment, endangers days and weeks of work. And it is led, in the field, by the presentation officers. How they manage to retain a youthful serenity is by no means the least of the miracles wrought in CHTV3’s Gloucester Street studios every day and night of the week.
The grand strategy of this repeated operation is the master log. This begins with the arrival from Wellington of a programme schedule, about a month before the programme is presented. It sets out the features to be played, their approximate times of telecast But these are merely the bones of a programme, not its body.
To give it life, there are nine sources of pictures, nine sources of sound available. The build-up of a log will probably begin with a test pattern at 1.45 p.m. It is scheduled to last 14min. 35sec. In the 25 seconds before 2 p.m., there is channel identification. The headline news lasts 2 1/2 minutes, then there is the programme summary and, at 2.03 p.m., time for the first feature. But already there have been pictures on videotape, from the announcer’s camera, from captions, from film, and sound from videotape, from the announcer, from discs, from film. The first feature lasts 24min. 36sec.
That is logged in advance, and so it goes on—often with the addition of closely-timed advertisements, always with the inclusion of announcements. Everything has to be timed to the second.
Placing Advertisements
The advertiser chooses one of four periods during the day—the costing for them varies and supplies the material for the commercial. The television advertising department compiles a list of times and types of commercials for a given day and from it the presentation officer must decide the order in which they will be used—always keeping in mind the need to avoid a conflict of similar products on the same commercial break. On a typical Saturday night, between 6.30 p.m. and 10 p.m., there will be 21 minutes of commercials, up to 50 individual advertisements to be spread evenly through the breaks, and threaded into the general picture.
He must also make certain that the advertisements appear during the period ordered; so it is that the loss of an advertisement through a minor technical fault, or a more serious break-down, leaves the presentation officer with the task of re-assembling his material to include the lost advertisement before its advertising period elapses.
The second hand of the stop-watch is a demanding master. Every announcement has to be written out in advance, and timed, for the films and videotapes on which features are recorded need time to reach their proper speed—five seconds for a film, eight seconds for a videotape. So the presentation officer must know at what stage of an announcement he must call for the film or tape to be started so it will appear on screen at precisely the right moment.
Such timing in all these matters is essential, never more so since the beginning of national links for news and such programmes as Gallery. It would be chaotic if a feature had to be cut before its proper end had been reached, because it was time for the national news.
The Newsroom
In CHTV3’s Manchester Street offices there is a very busy newsroom, looking very like its counterpart in a newspaper, with the insistent chatter of the teleprinter providing background noise. There are many news bulletins, but a major task for the television news team is the production of The South Tonight five times a week. It is on the air about 7.17 p.m. but items can be included very late, if they are important; there have been instances of news revision and ending as late as 7.10 p.m.
The news bulletin from Wellington is taken by the three main centres, Christchurch supplying to Dunedin. All the switching from centre to centre for the various news items is done by the staff at the transmitters in Christchurch, at Sugar Loaf. They are provided in advance with the final words of each item so they can make their switches at the right second.
Nearby is the art department, with a captions centre, a design production office for sets for minor programmes, and a senior designer’s office, where major sets are designed in collaboration with the producer concerned. The sets are built in premises in Bernard Street and re-assembled in Gloucester Street.
Cans of film stand in long rows in the transcriptions department, which ensures that the delivery and receipt of film to and from other centres is completed on time. There is a cominercial programmes compiling section, with more racks of films, labelled and dated. This splicing of advertisements into features is the task of the commercial compiler or commercial film editor. And there is a film editing room, for locally produced programmes, and news. A Christchurch production may take thousands of feet of film: it has to be cut and edited to reduce it to exactly the right number of minutes and seconds.
Early evening, and the South Tonight team is rehearsing, and the film to be shown is run through. It is a scene of apparent confusion, the announcers in the brightly-lit studio, the control team, under the presentation officer, in a control room darkened, yet colourful with its panels of buttons and lights.
Skilful Team
Beside the presentation officer sits the production secretary, who has to ensure that every staff member is ready in the positions required, and to give stand-by calls to telecine operators for any film required in the South Tonight programme. She watches the fleeting seconds carefully as each item or film insertion nears completion, to warn of the next one almost due. There are technicians to control and watch lighting, the cameras, camera quality, film quality. The presentation officer communicates with the studio camera crew, the videotape room, and another control room upstairs, responsible for continuity.
On his other side sits a vision mixer who, on direction from the presentation officer, cuts from one camera shot to another, from film to camera, or back again. There is a sound operator, to make sure the sound is as required by the picture. How this skilful team can use its 15 sources of picture and sound with such expertise is astonishing; not one of them seems to have been long out of the sixth form.
With the local production, "Moving.” there Were as many as 15 microphones, each to be used at its proper moment. But the instructions are crisp, precise; the operators look as if they have all been at' it for years. The night we visited CHTV3, the South Tonight presentations officer was informed, only minutes before the show started, that his second child had just been born. No time for back-slapping and the handing out of cigars. And the show went through without a flaw.
Upstairs, the telecine room, a fascinating place. All films on screen originate here. Film runs through a special transmission projector, looking like the sort of thing shown to friends after a holiday. But it is reflected through the lens to a mirror, set at an angle to send the images on to a videcon camera which takes the picture to the control room and on to the Sugar Loaf transmitter. The telecine operator also has a desk and rows of buttons to operate the several projectors ready for use. Close by, there is the camera control unit, to maintain the quality of the picture.
Expensive Item
In the same section, the captions are housed. That impressive clock seen on TV screens is a miserable thing in fact, about 10 inches square, and looking distinctly tatty.
Nearby there is another control room, a duplicate of the ground floor one, and this is used for all the programmes other than local productions. The most expensive single item of equipment is the videotape machine, on the ground floor. This machine, which looks like ordinary office equipment, records on to magnetic tape pictures as well as sound. It also has immediate play-back facilities.
The quietest part of the building is the “engine room.” There are banks of technical equipment, miles of wiring, high voltage lines, a complete power unit, with a monitor selector system to trace the origin of a fault swiftly.
Every section of this vast enterprise is linked with the work of the presentation officer. In the event of mechanical break-down, he has to keep viewers informed about the state of the emergency, and to keep a picture of some sort on the screen. He takes whole programmes from schedules to screens.
It is difficult, now, to see a second hand sweeping without feeling a sympathy, and admiration, for the extraordinary teamwork, which brings television to the home. It is going to be even more difficult to turn our set off: it would seem distinctly unappreciative.
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