Photo by Ian Collins, no reproduction without permission.
VT editor Ian Collins took a number of photographs of outdated kit when BBC Pebble Mill was cleared, prior to being demolished in 2005.
This is the keyboard of a Sony BVE 9100 edit controller, used in linear tape editing.
It would have been used in one of the VT suites.
Ray Lee adds the following information about what the edit controller did:
‘The edit controller allows you to select ‘in’ and ‘out’ points during a VT edit, controls the ‘play in’ and ‘record’ machines, executes the edit and stores the edit points for if you need to go back again. It is a lot more involved than that, (like most things) but a more detailed explanation would probably be confusing. The edit controller could control several players at once, as well as audio sources, digital video effects machines, and the recorder, so it was possible to do quite complex edits including fades from one source to another, as a single pass, once you had identified the timecode points at which you wanted these things to happen.