Technical

 
"I hope we don't have another General Election, at least for the next few years, but given the present political situation, who knows?"  This view is understandable from Dave Howard's perspective.  As BBC Cymru Wales' Technology Operations Manager, such large scale events pose significant logistical challenges.  "For the most recent Assembly Elections we hired around 20 satellite trucks, and we had to split our C1 TV studio to provide separate feeds for BBC and S4C."

 
"I really love my job", claimed Danny Hargreaves (above), the founder and MD of Real SFX, as he fired what appeared to be lazer gun at some lurking Daleks at the back of the company's premises in Cardiff.  On the evening of the 29th February, RTS Members were given some very impressive demonstrations of how to create realistic special effects for TV and film covering a wide range of situations.

(above)  Jamie Medhurst (Aberystwyth University),  Don McLean (Chair, RTS History Group),  and Tim Hartley (Chair, RTS Wales Centre)

Paul Hawke Williams (above) has an infectious enthusiasm, summed up in his attitude to post production, "It's so easy to edit these days ... non-linear editing is like word processing".  He heads up Digital Media Training, a Cardiff-based training company that also has centres in Manchester, Tewkesbury, London and Glasgow.

Innovation! Innovation! Innovation!

Above:  The team from ARRI, with Milan Krsljanin on the right with Tim Hartley

(photo:Fan Wang)

Local TV:  Keep Calm and It's Not That Bad

Describing the new digital model for local television in the UK, Chris Romilly, Comux UK's Chief Technical Officer, suggested that, "What's happening here is something new for television, new locally, new for news and ... new for everything"