Quality Saga pt 3

The reply from Lord Patten to the letter (see Quality Saga pt 2) Thank you for your letter and for enclosing the letter written by Louise Willcox, headed BBC — Doing Less, But Making It Sound Better. I note that at the Institute you have become increasingly concerned about what you feel is a decline…

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Quality Saga pt 2

PO Box 208 Havant Hampshire PO9 9BQ 4th August 2011 The Lord Patten Chairman BBC Trust 180 Great Portland Street London W1W 5QZ Dear Lord Patten, RE: BBC – DOING LESS, BUT MAKING IT SOUND BETTER We hope the headings below will assist reference. 1. Who are we, and should you take us seriously? 2.…

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Quality Saga pt 1

The IBS has written to the BBC Trust Chairman, Lord Patten of Barnes on the subject of lack of training and falling operational standards in sound. The chain of correspondence which followed is posted here in the interests of wider dissemination. The initial contact was a covering letter from  Simon Bishop, IBS Chairman. Read on……

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Mentoring report – June 2011

Its been about a year since we started the scheme and 6 months since the first mentoring pairs were set up and, so far, the scheme seems to be going well. First things first… the numbers. In the last 6 months we have had 20 enquiries to join the scheme,17 people have joined and have…

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Notes From The Front Row

Conrad Fletcher MIPS describes the technical challenges of relaying a live stage performance via satellite to a cinema audience around the world. You would have thought that a live transmission to cinemas in 5.1 would be broadly similar to a live surround sound TV transmission, and indeed that’s what I thought when I first started…

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Great Drama – But Can You Hear What They’re Saying Now?

Louise Willcox MIBS, Executive Committee Member and volunteer to the Listener and Viewer’s TV Audibility Group, reports on her experiences in a major recent exercise to assess the difficulties of dialogue audibility across a range of programmes and broadcasters. The Voice of the Listener and Viewer’s TV Audibility Group (TVAG), formed in 2007, has been…

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UK's first common TV Programme delivery standards

Post production departments will be glad to hear that the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) has today unveiled common technical standards for tape delivery of HD and SD TV programmes to all major UK broadcasters. Producers will now have just one set of guidelines that cover Technical Specifications, Picture and Sound Quality for Delivery to the…

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VLV’s Audibility of Speech on Television Project

PRESS RELEASE People with hearing difficulties could soon benefit from adjustments to be made to the sound quality on TV programmes, thanks to research undertaken by Voice of the Listener & Viewer (VLV), the BBC and RNID in 2010. The survey results have shown that with greater awareness and subsequent relatively minor changes in production…

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Helicopters, Private Jets, Super Yachts and Fast Cars

Paul Keyworth MIBS describe his experiences working on making the TV interview series ‘Piers Morgan on…’ It all began, rather conventionally as a three half-hour ITV1 documentary series on Sandbanks in Dorset –  apparently the most expensive real estate area of the UK – involving a fairly straightforward look at the characters that made this…

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Sound with Vision

Article reprinted with permission from www.broadcastnow.co.uk Fixing poor-quality audio in post can be a difficult and costly business. So what can be done to reduce the problem before it gets to that stage? Adrian Pennington asks the experts. Poor-quality audio is often reason enough for viewers to change channel, yet cheap-sounding soundtracks are commonly caused…

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