Mtv
Europe 1987 Mtv
Europe 1987
MTV Transmission Christmas 1987. On the right the ADO sound mixer (stereo input), centre the Cox T8 vision mixer.
To the left of the vision mixer is the Questec Charisma digital effects control box (the keyboard with coloured keys and a T bar handle). Above it the questec monitor (the one with disk drive) showing the settings for digital effects.
In front of the Questec (coloured) keyboard) there is the right hand end of the control unit for the Sony Betacart system. The square illuminated white buttons were to control the rolling of the 4 Betacam machines in the Betacart tower. The top row of buttons were STOP, middle row FREEZE and bottom row PLAY. These were in four vertical rows. I can't remember what the two on the right did.
A tiny transmission monitor was the one in the center and you can just see (Peter Gabriel I think) a person singing. This monitor was only 14in and about 6ft away and we were always complaining about it. Above the TX monitor was a row of even smaller preview monitors. Note all our Christmas decorations. It was never normally as neat as this as it was tidied up for the picture. Yes it was on-air at the time this picture was taken and I was just taking a few shots between the next mix. I guess it was probably about 4 in the morning. One person (me) had to make a sound and vision mix every few minutes to join all the pop videos together, sometimes with a digital effect too. Once you got used to it it was easier than it sounds with the right hand operating the sound mixer and the left rolling the the next video and then doing the vision mix or effect. Those bloody BBC wankers had different areas to do sound and vision!! but we did it as a package and it made things much more immeadiate and fresh. Just in front of the vision mixer is a tiny 3 inch strip of wood and that is were I rested my plate when it was dinner time, and just looking up now and then to do a mix!
This
picture probably gives a clearer view of the equipment. Due to the camera flash
you cant see much life in the equipment, but it is on and transmitting live
to Eutelsat at the time.
I can't remember what satellite MTV Europe use from 31st august 1987 until it moved to Astra. If anyone knows I would love to know. I think it was 13 degrees East but not sure and would like to know the transponder used as well.
I
have a soft spot for that old transponder, which is probably still in use somewhere
as we abused it quite a bit. The biggest bit of fun was to feed the off air
sound from our satellite receiver back up a mixer channel again, thereby getting
the satellite delay mixed with the audio. This produced a really good echo which
we sometimes used to spice up the sound on trailers and boring videos. A guy
I worked with was well into video production and used some crazy video keying
effects with off air video delayed by the satellite. This same guy (Gez) also
fired up the production studio one night (lights cameras the lot) and sat on
the settee doing live pieces to camera between the videos, while his assistant
rolled in the next track!!
I must admit that one night I got so pissed of with really boring overnight voice continuity announcements (which we played back from a Sonifex cart machine with a silly logo in vision), that I went and recorded my own voice overs and stuck them on air!
This
is the massive £166,000 Sony Betacart machine, which consists of four Betacam
players and a computer controlled conveyer belt system to extract the tapes
from the trays on the right and insert them into the correct player. The tapes
had a barcode label on their spine, which identifed them to the Betacart computer
and carried cueing infomation.
The system could run itself for up to 40 tapes worth, but the joins between the videos were terrible. A bit like MTV today in fact.
