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"Trouble" Slides

S

Stanislav

In watching old TV clips on YouTube, I've noted a few examples of old-timey "technical difficulties" type slides used when things went wrong. The networks had their various such slides, and local stations had theirs, sometimes created in-house. Some of these were creative and/or amusing. I recall one such (I think it was CBS) which was a cartoon of a guy with his head buried in the bowels of a TV camera, tossing parts over his shoulder.

So, what are some of the more unusual or creative "trouble" slides you've seen in your years? And, for that matter, which stations did NOT use such slides? (I've seen stations in the past that would just slap up an ID slide when things went sour).
 
The two most recent I have seen, within the past year or two, have been WNET which is basically logo over a still picture of the city (I think it said New York instead of COL Newark) and for WCBS which was just a legal ID graphic
 
LIN-TV's WCTX/59 MY TV 9 in New Haven just uses a giant version of their logo on the screen. Interestingly enough the last time they had major technical difficulties they used their old logo. (It was a couple months after they had changed their branding to UPN 9).

Several years back The New York Yankees didn't have a regular affiliate in Hartford, so some of the games were picked up by WTWS (now WHPX),The PAX owned Infomercial station. Obviously being an all infomercial station they didn't have any advertisers and during local commercial breaks they'd show a Giant 26 Logo and underneath the calls.
 
Our Armed Forces TV station had a slide of a cartoon "tech" with a WTF look on his face with the words printed under him, "The film did what?".

The audio that played during that downtime(from a dedicated cart machine) was an instrumental version of "This Could Be The Start Of Something Big".
 
The stations I've worked for just had a slide or electronic graphic of the station logo. The first station I worked for even had audio carts with music to play in the background. We had a TCR100 which could be very troublesome. The place I work for now has electronic graphics of the network logos, but we have three backups so we should never, ever have to use the emergency graphic.

I caught WNET-DT with their pants down last June. Here's a screen shot. http://www.softneasy.com/techdiff.jpg
 
davect said:
We had a TCR100 which could be very troublesome.
Click to expand...

One TCR100?

What happened when it took a dive--no spots until the engineers
got it back up?

IIRC, in a :73 break you had to program the :10 first, then the
two :30s (followed by the ID if it was on cart) as the TCR took
more than :10 to unload, load and cue up the next element.
Now an ACR-25...

The younger TV folks who are savvy with digital servers and the
like are probably wondering "what the heck is a TCR-100 and an
an ACR-25?" I better not mention VR1100 or TR-22. ;D
 
oldiesfan6479 said:
One TCR100?

What happened when it took a dive--no spots until the engineers
got it back up?
Click to expand...
Engineers? Not after 5pm! I either fixed it if I was able or made a comp reel if at least one the players worked. Other than that the PSA reel got put into one of the 3/4" U-Matic top loaders! :)

IIRC, in a :73 break you had to program the :10 first, then the
two :30s (followed by the ID if it was on cart) as the TCR took
more than :10 to unload, load and cue up the next element.
Click to expand...
Ya...:10, :15 and :20's went first or last as it took about 20 seconds to rewind and unload a cart then find, load it and cue the next one.

The younger TV folks who are savvy with digital servers and the
like are probably wondering "what the heck is a TCR-100
Click to expand...

2 inch wide tape in cassettes operated by a large pneumatically operated machine. Here's a picture of the beast! http://www.oldradio.com/archives/hardware/TV/rca-tcr100.jpg

So back in the 70's and early 80's this was the cause of many an emergency slide being put on the air!
 
At the PBS station I worked at in college in the 80s, interns were used to build break tapes (running on good old U-matic 3/4 in machine...). By the end of each semester, you became very good on your timing of the break tapes.

Of course, then there was always the standby "static" shot ID with a separate cart with PBS themes on it for "filler"... Every once in a while, you'd see the ID, hear the entire 60 second theme, then hear little "click" as the MC Op restarted the audio cart... (unless he/she was shutting down the FM station at the time (usually at midnight), and you'd get the ID with one go round of the music, then dead air, before he/she could start Jack Horkheimer's Star Hustler show before shutting down the TV station...).

Since we were a small college PBS station, we had a station-wide sync which wasn't tied to the satellite feed, which wasn't a big deal, except for the occasional fundraising time when we would sync to the on-air signal in the studio (so that we could put fundraising bugs on the program), but were carrying two PBS shows live on the satellite that were on different transponders and we had to go to black for about 5 seconds to change transponders as the sync signal changed from one feed to the other. We finally got a frame sync for the satellite feed, so that whatever satellite signal we used would sync to the house sync signal...

Jim
 
I would like to see the videos of those technical difficulty moments, what should I type into youtube to find it? Also, the original poster mentioned the CBS trouble slide with the guy in the camera, I remember one used by I'm guessing NBC with a TV repairman holding two ends of a broken cable with sparks coming out of each end and he was going to tie them together to fix the problem, that would have been shocking! Sorry, bad pun.
 
oldiesfan6479 said:
davect said:
The younger TV folks who are savvy with digital servers and the
like are probably wondering "what the heck is a TCR-100 and an
an ACR-25?" I better not mention VR1100 or TR-22. ;D
Click to expand...

Well, as one of the "younger TV folks" I haven't had the pleasure to work with the ACR-25, VR1100, or the TR-22, but at my previous station, I have had to deal with DVCPros, and Beta decks that would fail on the air, and we would have to go to trouble slide. Or when a the signal fails from the network due to an ice storm in the area, and the satellites don't have heaters on them, and the satellite dish freezes up during primetime and I have no where to go but to trouble slide until I get up to the roof to un-ice the dishes. Ahh, the good old days...

Now working for a major network, I do have to deal with digital servers, but they do go down. They do crash. So, even working at a network, I know how it is to loose your servers due to a server crash, and have to go to trouble slide until someone can run upstairs and thrown in the tape of the show that was currently airing until the servers come back up.

My favorite part of working in television (especially in Broadcast Operations) is when something goes wrong. That is the funniest time to work in television. I have always had a fascination with trouble slides, I don't know why.
Click to expand...
 
notalkallstatic said:
Now working for a major network, I do have to deal with digital servers, but they do go down. They do crash. So, even working at a network, I know how it is to loose your servers due to a server crash, and have to go to trouble slide until someone can run upstairs and thrown in the tape of the show that was currently airing until the servers come back up.
Click to expand...

Well, this begs a few questions...

Networks always used to simul-roll two copies of each show, at least in
prime time--two one-inch tapes, or earlier, two two-inch tapes or even
a 35mm (primary) and 16mm (backup) film, where they'd roll in the
spots "live" from other sources. IIRC, by the early- to mid-70s they
had gone to dubbing the entire program with spots and promos to tape.

Aren't they now "rolling" two servers, each with a copy of the program,
in case one takes a dive? I ask since you mention their reliability (or
lack of).

And if the (only) server fails and you have to "go upstairs and throw on
a tape of the show" why not just play it from tape to begin with?
 
oldiesfan6479 said:
notalkallstatic said:
Now working for a major network, I do have to deal with digital servers, but they do go down. They do crash. So, even working at a network, I know how it is to loose your servers due to a server crash, and have to go to trouble slide until someone can run upstairs and thrown in the tape of the show that was currently airing until the servers come back up.
Click to expand...

Well, this begs a few questions...

Networks always used to simul-roll two copies of each show, at least in
prime time--two one-inch tapes, or earlier, two two-inch tapes or even
a 35mm (primary) and 16mm (backup) film, where they'd roll in the
spots "live" from other sources. IIRC, by the early- to mid-70s they
had gone to dubbing the entire program with spots and promos to tape.

Aren't they now "rolling" two servers, each with a copy of the program,
in case one takes a dive? I ask since you mention their reliability (or
lack of).

And if the (only) server fails and you have to "go upstairs and throw on
a tape of the show" why not just play it from tape to begin with?
Click to expand...

At the network I work for, we have what are called "Chains" there is the "A Chain" and "B Chain." Most of the time we stay on the A chain, but if something goes wrong, we switch to the B-chain. In the event that the A-chain does not come back up within a short amount of time, we start rolling tape, in the event that the B Chain goes down, we can switch to tape.

There has been one time when I was on the "board", that both of my chains have gone down at once and I went to trouble slide until a tape was thrown in.

Even through, I love computers, and thank they are great, I don't trust them. No engineer in the world can convince me that I should put my trust into a server. I don't trust servers, I don't trust computers.

The ONLY time, I might actually believe that the automation will run by itself, and I won’t need an operator there, if it’s being ran off a Mac. Of all the automation systems that I’ve used, none of them has been ran off Macs. Then, what comes into play is the problem with the servers. In the event it crashes who will punch up the secondary chain.

If I ever owned a network or a TV station, I can tell you one thing, the one group of people I won’t outsource, is the “Operators,” they have your network/station by the balls, in the palm of their hands.
 
notalkallstatic said:
At the network I work for, we have what are called "Chains" there is the "A Chain" and "B Chain."
Click to expand...
Where I work we go even further. We have servers in two diferent parts of town. One at the origination facility and one at the transmission facility. We also have a server that plays down programming 5 hours in advance so we can catch any ingest or timing issues ahead of time. This advance feed is also recorded to another server and played back 5 hours later so we now have a third backup. We can switch to any of these sources at any time from either location. We should NEVER EVER have to go to the trouble slide. Having said that, master control is now quite dull and boring because of technology. Far more reliable, but uninteresting.
 
davect said:
Where I work we go even further. We have servers in two diferent parts of town. One at the origination facility and one at the transmission facility. We also have a server that plays down programming 5 hours in advance so we can catch any ingest or timing issues ahead of time. This advance feed is also recorded to another server and played back 5 hours later so we now have a third backup. We can switch to any of these sources at any time from either location. We should NEVER EVER have to go to the trouble slide.
Click to expand...

Confidence is a nice thing, but remember Murphy's Law. Those words may come back to haunt you one day.... ;)
 
Confidence is a nice thing, but remember Murphy's Law. Those words may come back to haunt you one day.... ;)
Click to expand...
I said SHOULD never need the trouble slide. We've come close, but not quite. Yet...
 
davect said:
Confidence is a nice thing, but remember Murphy's Law. Those words may come back to haunt you one day.... ;)
Click to expand...
I said SHOULD never need the trouble slide. We've come close, but not quite. Yet...
Click to expand...

Beats dead air, at any rate. :) I wonder what the record is for a broadcast station transmitting a black void of nothingness without putting up a slide or something. Guess things would have to really collapse for that to happen for very long.
 
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