Okay, I know why they switch to the coop cam when the housemates are getting dressed or Jade is drunk and naked, but when they're sitting around talking, as they've been doing this afternoon, why does the director keep switching to the coop cam? The sound isn't being dipped, nothing is going on, and I don't get it.

They do it all the time, and I can't figure it out.

Any ideas?

Yep. Maggie the chickens have more charisma and are better looking than at least 3 of the HM's.

Gwad bless their little bottoms

MGOM

Because they don't know how to produce a live show. I think the production team is quite useless. Even during the CH4 highlights they end up putting useless stuff in like a few minutes of the house mates sleeping.

Also there has been times when they were live and they choose to focus on the one housemate by themselves in the bedroom, while 2-3 others have a conversation on the couches.

I must say they sure as heck aren't the most competent production team.

Maybe they are trying to give a 'flavour' of the whole????

Well I'm not sure what flavour they are going for, but whatever it is it's pretty crap.

the perpose is to see the chickens s**t ,f***k and sleep

its sooooo intresting isn't it

oh yeh and dont forget to see them lay eggs

it will make you faint

and what about the sound? it seems to get cut out even when the HM don't seem to be talking or mentioning anything that might seem to contravene rules about being sued etc

on a similar vein, why do they cut sound on one of the feeds and not the other, when you can hear what is being said on the muted feed.

Well, the people monitoring will need the occasional toilet or fag break, much easier to just turn the sound off than take the risk of anything nasty getting through.

Presumably it's because a different producer is monitoring each feed and one is deafer than the other

On a slightly different note, did anyone see Jonny before saying some bad things about a particular make of brush (can't remember which one), and the sound wasnt cut. Do they just guess that no brush-makers will be watching the show?

hmmm.ch 4 dont mention the 'toilet or meal breaks' thing when explaining about the sound cuts, just swearing, legal reasons and 'inappropriate behaviour.

Hey,imagine if, during The Live Aid concert, if, Just before Bob Geldolfs famous utterance, the picture was replaced with a test card and the sound blanked cos the cameraman had gone off for a wee.
A great moment in history lost.

I quite like the chicken cam

So we don't get to see Jade's overused crack. Thank God for the coop cam!

OK right now listen carefully....

Only 2 different things can be recorded in the house at the same time . and they are usually on feed A and feed B. when there comes a time that they need to cut away from any action going on in the house for any reason ,IE jades strip they carry on recording the action (so they have it to edit for the C4 show or to keep for the uncut DVD) but they have to put something on screen so they switch to the chickens which is not recorded and is not 10 minutes behind it is just a live feed and is not being recorded, thay can keep the audio as that is different to recording pics.

Same applys to when a housemate is being recorded in the diary room . you will see just a feed of the diary room door (or sometimes the chickens) because again only 2 things can be recorded from the house at the same time ,and that includeds diary room chats ...

Thanks for clearing that one up Sharon, it explains a lot of things.

I think we are asking why they only ever show feed A on the main E4. I cant understand why they dont switch feeds if Feed A is showing chickens, and Feed b is showing HM acitivity.

I understand what you are saying, but surely they have the technology to switch feed a or feed b to the main e4(and ch 4 when its on), if nothing is happening on the current main feed.

I do like to watch full screen, but half the time have to resort to the 1/2 screen feed b on interactive.
better than nothing I suppose, but...

Kate and Jonny were talking about Tim's reaction to hearing the chants outside the house, and the conversation was muted. It was getting quite interesting too. It didn't seem like the conversation need to be muted.

But later Kate was relating a drunken night out with her mates, mentioning their names and the sound wasn't muted. The conversation lasted for quite a bit of time too. So much for protecting the privacy of others outside the house.

So what's going on??

Don't think that's true. I have a newsletter from Resolution, the production company that handles Big Brother's technical stuff, and there's a full article on how they produced Big Brother 1 - and I'm sure it'd be pretty similar for this series. I'll quote a paragraph from the article (hope I'm allowed to, but there's obviously nowhere for me to link to...)

"Every significant event in Big Brother is entered into dedicated terminals in the production gallery and time-stamped before being stored in a central web-based archive. This searchable text, video and audio database is then used to create stories in running order for each programme, and was used during editing to check what was happening on the other cameras to enable editors to go directly to the correct shot."

All the footage from cameras is stored digitally on AVID Unity shared storage systems, allowing the edit suites to share footage from all sources. So the editing on the highlights shows are totally independent from the live feeds. Maybe they cut away from the action so much to give them something to put in the highlights shows that no-one's seen.

Gareth

Nice irony.

I think you know the answer already.
They don't want you to hear things that contradict the current storyline. How would it look if they showed Kate and Jonny plotting? The producers are in total control of what faces of the HMs you get to see. Bet kate and Jonny nominate exactly the same pair in the same order - betcha.

What Sharon said was pretty much what was said on BBLB recently. Feed A & B are more properly called Storyline 1 & Storyline 2. Not every camera can be recorded thus meaning that the producers have to produce a live show that they can edit down later. They can use any of the wallmounted cameras in the house for a static shot while they switch Storyline 1 over to the Diary Room for example. This is the reason why last year, whenever someone was in the Diary Room you only saw a static shot of the Diary Room door even though something else was happening in the house.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the sound drop-outs last night. The sound guy was very trigger-happy, knocking out sound all over the place, even when Kate was talking about covering some school books!

You're all over-analysing!!!!

It's there to entertain my cat. He loves them