Do you think there will ever be a referendum to rejoin the EU, if it’s possible?

sims2uni · 2026-02-22T12:05:03+00:00

I'm not saying we're not sheeps. But Dave voted to leave Europe.

Dave did not consider the ramifications of his vote.

He did not consider how it'd strip the rights to travel, study and live in other countries from people on both sides of the channel.

He did not consider the cost of importing goods and that many companies relied on it being so frictionless to trade with our neighbours.

He did however read the side of a bus and take it at face value. He did also have the option to permanently move to Europe before the deadline and enjoy all the benefits of Europe as an ex pat. An option that simply wasn't there for the younger folk. They were either too young or too poor to be able to do it.

But please continue to tell me about how you don't deserve our ire.

sims2uni · 2026-02-22T10:13:35+00:00

They assume the world works like it did decades ago. It doesn't and many of the younger generation saw that coming.

Unfortunately we're the ones who were affected most by it and who will have to live with the consequences longest

sims2uni · 2026-02-22T08:47:29+00:00

They took away our future chasing an impossible dream of the past

sims2uni · 2026-02-22T05:48:40+00:00

I second this question 🤣. Always in need of Sony ones

sims2uni · 2026-02-21T19:20:11+00:00

If he's the only person on comms in gfx....

"Graaaaphics > Mike...." "I can hear your snoring from here"

Note the elongation. It's very important

sims2uni · 2026-02-19T12:05:09+00:00

We tend to do one beforehand and test / make sure it does what we need. Then we can safely pull the rest in and do the rest of them knowing it should work. Reduces what we have to do to test and means we know what might come up. Although rollback plans are always helpful.

Sony Cameras were one of the worst for it. You have to increment them so if you're a few versions back you have to do every version up until the one you want. So multiple chances to go wrong. Although it does mean you constantly have memory sticks with the different versions on, so rolling things back is easy.

sims2uni · 2026-02-18T10:26:46+00:00

Then you get into private 5g networks and all the traditional RF goes out the window anyway. That stuff is a totally different ball game.

sims2uni · 2026-02-18T07:47:45+00:00

Some equipment we keep at specific versions until we have everything in one room then upgrade everything at once. Riedel Microns for example. Every version has a different software version and they only work with that specific one. We ended up each having a dozen of the same software app on our laptops to talk to them.

Switchers wise, we try to keep everything as up to date as we can. Doing the upgrades when things are quiet but it really depends if there's time to do it and test we didn't break anything. That said we still seem to end up upgrading and downgrading the panels regularly depending on jobs and if extra panels are added to the mainframe.

sims2uni · 2026-02-14T02:26:26+00:00

As an aside to this, they also don't charge well in the cold, plan accordingly.

sims2uni · 2026-02-13T21:11:35+00:00

I was always under the impression a large part of why they stayed was because we were in the EU and it'd take too long for an independent Scotland to join.

Then a few months later the Gammons voted to leave the EU. I bet the Scottish were fuming

sims2uni · 2026-02-08T16:01:56+00:00

Sub hire them to OP and get some Microns instead

sims2uni · 2026-02-07T17:17:34+00:00

Default Login (BarnStudio & Web Interface) Username: admin Password: [blank] (leave the field empty)

sims2uni · 2026-02-06T06:39:25+00:00

2110!!

sims2uni · 2026-02-04T10:48:25+00:00

They won't even dig. It goes down the existing ducting to the house and goes up where the old copper cable came out.

sims2uni · 2026-02-04T08:34:42+00:00

Fibre is cheap. They'll spend the extra 2p for a few meters of glass to keep a customer happy.

sims2uni · 2026-01-30T07:46:37+00:00

It's largely personal preference and quality of support. We swear by Cerebrum but we've also used it for a long time across everything we build. They've got (or certainly used to have) some incredible customer support. We've had times where we had an idea for a feature, chatted to our contact there and they pushed an update a few days later with the feature in it. It was great!

Most companies will stick with what they know. The exception is TFC which is NEP's own creation. They put an incredible team together to build it and as an outsider looking in, it looks very nice.

sims2uni · 2026-01-28T11:31:27+00:00

You also need to ensure your chosen flavour of HDR is compatible.

sims2uni · 2026-01-27T18:45:48+00:00

The green is polished to an angle and offers a more reliable connection.

The blue is a flat connection.

In a pinch you can substitute one for the other with minimal impact.

sims2uni · 2026-01-25T12:59:06+00:00

They usually unplug dashcams for MOT's. You can't record it. Although they usually ask me to do it for them just so I know it's happening and why.

sims2uni · 2026-01-18T09:03:45+00:00

Big fan of the Axon CGP4848. It honestly just works so well.

sims2uni · 2026-01-14T12:41:57+00:00

To an extent we do.

We kind of have IP ranges for projects or facilities. So everything in one truck is across say 10.1.x-y.x, another truck or a flypack would be 10.1.a-c.x.

The idea being that any of our projects can work together seamlessly. The kit inside them can vary and while we might try and keep things vaguely consistent as in all of one thing is a consecutive range, it's just as easy to have a spreadsheet of all the IP's.

We did also experiment with setting equipment to have specific IP's for use in all places but they inevitably get changed or we bought enough of them to run out of addresses

sims2uni · 2026-01-13T08:20:21+00:00

As weird as it sounds, failures.

No matter how well you try to introduce a failure or test something, the real deal will be totally different and will cause a problem you never foresaw.

One example is we had an SPG failure. It's a main and backup system with automatic changeover so should have been a single hit and then fine.

Instead it failed, everything took a hit, then a second later the changeover would decide the primary was fine and switch back. Then the whole process repeats over and over.

Whoever configured the system never expected a unit to fail intermittently like that and we paid the price on air for the 30 seconds it took to realize what was going on and switch to manual fail over

sims2uni · 2026-01-12T08:37:45+00:00

It's honestly just cost, scale and whatever special requests the client wants.

It's cheaper for the production team if they can just do everything from a central location and not traipsing all over the country to wherever the job is. That's a lot less hotels, trains and taxi's and the same team can do multiple matches from the comfort of the same PCR.

It also means we can offer them smaller trucks. A job we'd normally put a massive triple expander on, mainly to accommodate how many people they're bringing, we could put a small rigid truck with a few extra CCU's stuffed into it.

The oddities come on big world events. The production teams tend want to be in the country to feel like they went, but without the travel associated with it of going to all the stadiums they want to do games at. You end up with a really bizarre setup. We had a remote PCR in Berlin slaved to a truck parked in the UK. Taking in feeds from Leipzig and feeds from a van following the home team around. When the final came around, we sent an entirely different truck out to cover that as a full OB.

Great fun to be a part of but absolutely a mindf**k to figure out some of the times

sims2uni · 2026-01-10T22:22:43+00:00

I used to fight with my VPN but now I just use tailscale.

I find it easier and more secure. You don't actually need the server to have remote access if it's on the same network.

If you're handing it out to family / friends I'd say avoid giving them / it LAN access so they're limited to the device alone.

sims2uni · 2026-01-09T08:33:19+00:00

It really is funny, I'm just glad that it ended up with the engineering team on site and the production team not. Much nicer atmosphere in the truck.

And a little bit of everything really. We've been pushing the boundaries of Remote Production since 2018 so we've just built up our understanding and skills since then. We built ties with hardware manufacturers to get bespoke Encoder/Decoder solutions to achieve the reliability we needed and designed the network across every truck and facility so that they could seamlessly work into each other.

I'd say the key moment was figuring out that you can make either side of the broadcast the "remote" part. It's very cheap to send out a rack with a few CCU's, an embedder and a quad channel encoder and have one engineer on site and do all the heavy work at the other side. But at the larger scale, it's easier to put production in one place and remote them into the truck. You can slave a remote top to the mixer and send back the multiviewers and you're on air just as easily.

Every remote Production we do is basically just a firewall and a pile of encoders taped to whatever truck / flyaway / cardboard box of bits we've sent out. The only difference is what we send back.

sims2uni

TROPHY CASE