Tag: CM2

Vanity Fair – Mark Hill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Polishing off an ice lolly on the left at the back of this still is yours truly.

I recall the ‘Vanity Fair’ shoot (with many scenes at Blickling Hall). It was toward the end of my time at Pebble Mill (fond memories) before I jumped ship to Central (ITV). I was working in G41 at the time (post production and OB maintenance). As I recall, I had been sent to Norfolk as a ‘guarantee engineer’, with the aim of minimising any downtime on the production should any of the technical kit on CM2 breakdown.

I well remember the night time scenes and trying to get the best pictures out of the Philips LDK-14 colour cameras and the Ampex VPR-2B videotape recorders that were fitted to the OB unit (CM2). I remember seeing the series on TX and wincing at the dreadful video lag evident on shots with candles in them; the noise on the low light scenes; and the occasional suspect corner registration. Not suprised that the BBC re-made ‘Vanity Fair’ as part of the move to 16:9!

Mark Hill

CM2

 

 

CM 2

Leigh Sinclair in CM2

Photos by Ben Peissell and Tim Savage, no reproduction without permission.

The lower photo shows VT Editor, Leigh Sinclair in CM2.

CM2 was an outside broadcast truck based at BBC Pebble Mill.  It normally had two cameras controlled from it, and was used to record programmes like ‘Gardeners’ World’, before portable single cameras became the norm in the mid 1980s.

Mike Bloore was a VT editor who worked on CM2:

‘There was no edit controller on CM2’s VTR’s. There was only a button to start both machines at the same time and trust to luck! On ‘Gardeners World’ we often did “roll back and mix” which involved playing back the last shot of the previously recorded sequence through the vision mixer allowing the vision mixer(the person) to mix through to the live camera of the next sequence to be shot while recording the whole event on the other VTR. This enabled mixes on location to be possible with only 2 VTR’s. Then someone invented pre-read but thats another story!’

Mike Bloore