Here’s the full version of the new title music for the Setanta Sports show iTalkSport. I must have been too busy in the previous post writing about the new virtual studio set that I forgot to mention that I also did the theme tune.

Listen here:

iTalkSport title music

Recently completed – a brand new virtual studio set for Setanta’s iTalkSport show that launched on Friday.

iTalkSport is a late-night sport discussion programme and the set prominently features views of the Dublin skyline.

This virtual set project consisted of two main challenges – designing and building the actual structure of the set, and putting ‘live’ shots behind the presenters and guests.

It was a close call whether we would be using four permanently mounted roof-top cameras to feed the backgrounds. In the end we went for a less expensive (but more complicated!) solution. The whole thing is running on the RT Software tOG VR system, isn’t dependent on the weather, and has the uncanny feature of rendering street-lamps invisible.

I’ll give a full behind-the-scenes glimpse later on, but for now, here are some grabs from Friday’s show.

…read more

You can now download a new set of our popular Weather Symbols as animated GIFs.

40 original weather icons at 4 different sizes, ideal for websites and iPhone / iPad apps.

There are now 3 different formats available – PNG with solid backgrounds, PNG with transparent backgrounds, and this new set of animated GIFs. …read more

Election Graphics, Virtual Reality and Swingometers

So, they’re off! The 2010 Election Campaign starts now, and while most people will be wondering who’ll be in No.10 next month, I’m wondering who’ll come out on top in the Election Graphics stakes.

The last BBC Election programme I worked on was back in 2006, and there’s a part of me that misses the excitement of a live election broadcast. Often weeks, months (sometimes years) of work all come together for one almighty extravaganza. A nail-biting marathon of TV graphics where the entire programme is only a power-cut away from disaster.

I notice the BBC has launched its Election 2010 website – and among other things they already have a nice interactive swingometer here with a neat explanation from Jeremy Vine for the uninitiated.

There’s a possible hint of the Election night graphics by way of a branded banner at the top of all of the Election 2010 web pages : party-coloured discs or buttons radiating from a central point.

It’s hard to say whether this is ‘Campaign’ branding, or ‘Election’ branding – I would guess by now that the various departments are all working to the same design guidelines by now.

…read more

Just a quick reminder that the Broadcast Video Expo opens on the 16th February at Earls Court in London.
It’’s one of the biggest UK technology events for broadcasters, audio and video manufacturers and suppliers, and anyone interested in production, post & delivery.

And of course, don’t forget to visit Booth B24 and have a chat with our good friends at RT Software.

RT Software develops and supplies PC-based real time 3D graphics solutions for broadcasters. These solutions are aimed at sports, news, elections, interactive TV, virtual sets and for playout graphics.

Visit the RT Software site now for Real-time 3D graphics broadcast solutions.

Red Giant Software are having a secret sale right now – ALL products 40% off. Just for the rest of today (about 11 hours left as I write this – sale ends at 11:59 PM PST).

As a big fan of Magic Bullet Looks, this was a great opportunity to upgrade to the full Magic Bullet suite.

I’ve just had a quick try out of a few of the plugins in After Effects – Instant HD 1.1 and Frames 1.0 look pretty nifty. Steady looked promising if a bit slow, but to be fair, the test footage I was trying was VERY shaky. I may try some more realistic tests later in the week.

Anyway, a big thank you to Mary and Dave at Red Giant for replying so promptly to my cheeky emails.

And also a very big thank you to Angus for phoning me earlier to let me know the sale was on in the first place.

I was very pleased to get an email today from the Series Producer of ‘The Hairy Bikers Food of Britain‘ (the show is still running on BBC Two – the final 5 episodes go out next week I think). I’d provided title logo, title graphics and content maps for all 30 episodes). Anyway – this is what he said :

…read more

Here’s my latest virtual set for Setanta Sports Ireland.

You can see it on some of the Magners League shows, and it’s also on air for ‘The Hub‘ with a different logo in the virtual screen.

As usual, it was built as a 3D model in Cinema 4D and then painstakingly textured up using my special secret process (which I may reveal as another blog post at some point).

Finally, it was exported as an fbx file which I loaded into tOG (by RT Software) for some final tweaks before the whole thing was zipped up and downloaded by Setanta at their end.

It was a pretty fast turnaround for this one – under a week to get it on air, with a few updates supplied after the first TX.

You can see more images here.

Conference : 10-14 September
Exhibition : 11-15 September

Although I won’t be able to make it over to Amsterdam for IBC this year, I thought I might just give a quick heads up to all you media types that my old pals from RT Software are exhibiting again this year. RT Software’s tOG 3D system is the technology behind some of my virtual studios and many of the real-time election graphics that appear on my site.

RT Software at IBC (RAI Amsterdam) : Hall 3 (3.A59)

…read more

Be sure to watch The Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain. It’s a 30 part series that starts tonight on BBC Two at 17.15 and is broadcast every weekday over the next few weeks.

Just putting the finishing touches to the graphics for the last few episodes.

See : Broadcast Design for Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour

Read the BBC press release

In response to requests, I’ve created a new set of Weather Icons based on the popular first set. These symbols are essentially the same but are now all PNGs with transparency, so the icons themselves can be used more easily on maps and other backgrounds (the low-res image below shows the icons on some suggested colours).

…read more

Over on the right there you should be seeing a little widget-like thing showing the weather forecast for Lovely Leitrim. (UPDATE: currently disabled). It’s using my own TV graphics-style Weather Icons which you can get here.

I don’t know exactly (yet) how to make it into a downloadable widget that other people could use on their own sites, but if I get time I may investigate how to package it up. At the moment it’s just hard coded into a regular text widget. And it’s also hard coded to pick up the weather forecast for Carrick-on-Shannon, so I expect the appeal might be… er… limited.

…read more

I’ve had plenty of people visiting my site looking for weather symbols to download so I thought it was about time that I actually made some weather symbols of my own.

The problem has been that everyone has been trying to get their hands on the old BBC ones which I ‘refreshed’ slightly as part of the 2005 BBC Weather relaunch. Obviously those symbols are owned by the Beeb, but I’ve been directing people back to the Weather Centre anyway, in the sure knowledge that they won’t be allowed to use them for copyright reasons. One visitor also reported back that they were refused permission because it also might be perceived as a ‘degree of endorsement by the BBC’.

Which is entirely fair enough.

So I decided to design a set of 40 new and unique weather symbols / icons that have a kind of ‘homage to old school TV graphics’ quality to them, but which have been designed entirely from scratch and obviously haven’t taken a single point, line or vector from the originals.

…read more

Seems the latest version of After Effects from Adobe (CS4) has changed the PAL D1/DV Widescreen square pixel preset.

In CS3, compositions using that preset would be set to 1024 x 576 pixels. The new version (CS4) uses 1050 x 576.

So which is right? 1024 or 1050?

Well, to begin with, it’s all a bit complicated. I can still remember when it was first explained to me many years ago when I was still at the BBC, and it’s the kind of thing that’s quite difficult to get your head around without drawing little pictures on the back of envelopes. Anyway, there’s a few resources out there that try to explain this (links included below) – but I thought I’d have a go myself.

…read more

I’ve noticed quite a bit of traffic coming to my site searching for ‘Weather Symbols’ so I thought it might be an idea to upload the full set of symbols that I made for the BBC as part of the 2005 relaunch. These are based on the original designs by Mark Allen, who submitted the familiar symbols to the BBC in 1974 while still a student in Norwich, and subsequent revisions by BBC graphic designers over the years.

The new set of symbols were redrawn in Illustrator and converted to PNG’s for use in Metra’s Weatherscape system which drives the graphics for all of the BBC’s weather graphics, both the realtime 3D forecasts and all of the web content too. The main changes are to the raindrop, the basic cloud outline and the colour of the lightning bolt. I had designed several possible replacement symbol sets as part of the initial pitch, but in the end there was no reason to change the classic icons – other than a couple of cosmetic tweaks. …read more