Radio visualisation

The forum discussing radio
Post Reply
Critique
Posts: 980
Joined: Mon 17 Aug, 2009 10.37
Location: Suffolk

I stumbled across a bit of one of the live Chris Moyles show programmes they did towards the end of the run on Radio 1, and was just wondering how the visualisation (I believe that's what radio like to call it) worked on it and other radio shows like it. On these days was there a gallery in an OB truck somewhere nearby cutting between all the cameras or was it more like someone in the studio selecting which webcam to show? Ordinarily this would seem to be the easiest thing to do, but I don't think a normal webcam feed would use things like outside sources, and when the show came from the radio theatre there were manned cameras to direct about and some jib thing on the ceiling to deal with, not just the normal webcams.

And how does it work when audio is played out along with video at the same time, like Newsbeat did when the Chris Moyles show came from the BBC Radio theatre? What normally would just have been an audio clip used the original video on the stream because it could, but I can't see a way of this being done without it being a major hassle, with the only ways around it I can see being either the gallery (or whatever set-up they used) cued the clips when video was broadcasting too, or they played out the video (silently) and just hoped they'd lined it up properly.

Whatever way it worked I can't imagine it was easy as presumably Chris still had control of playout of tracks and the fading of microphones.

Be interested to hear if anyone knows how these things work.
wells
Posts: 747
Joined: Sun 31 Jul, 2005 14.52

Generally what happens I imagine is the audio from the radio output is used over the shots that are mixed together in the gallery.
Critique wrote:And how does it work when audio is played out along with video at the same time, like Newsbeat did when the Chris Moyles show came from the BBC Radio theatre? What normally would just have been an audio clip used the original video on the stream because it could, but I can't see a way of this being done without it being a major hassle, with the only ways around it I can see being either the gallery (or whatever set-up they used) cued the clips when video was broadcasting too, or they played out the video (silently) and just hoped they'd lined it up properly.
Videos clips could just be fired by the 'DJ' the same way sound clips are but using a video playout system rather than an audio one. Presumably the audio of any videos the 'DJ' plays goes into the sound mixer and the video goes into the vision mixer in the gallery.

So I'm going to assume the 'DJ' has control over all sound output and a director chooses what shot to go to in the gallery that corresponds. Pretty simple but expensive.

More here: http://youtu.be/-KBEMOTYwTU?t=3m22s

I believe there are more automated systems available to broadcasters that don't have the pockets of the BBC that I think probably work by cutting to different shots depending on which channel the audio is coming from.
User avatar
AJ
Posts: 94
Joined: Mon 16 Feb, 2004 15.25
Location: London

When Chris Moyles did the longest show ever which was broadcast on the red button and online, he had a full OB truck parked outside the Radio 1 building for the week.

There's a video of Greg James and Chris Moyles doing a tour of the truck here.
Post Reply