It was serendipity: I was reading a magazine called Wireless World – which doesn’t exist anymore – and I just happened to open it at the adverts at the back, and there it said, ‘Granada Television is looking for trainee audio engineers’. I’d always been interested in high fidelity; in fact, I’d written my dissertation…
Read MoreIan Hunton describes the training he received as a video engineer at Granada
On the seventh floor, they had a training officer and an office that was divided into booths. They had these training machines then, which were microfilm. The training officer had written programmes about the technical aspects like lighting and lenses, and general theory about TV – colour didn’t exist then – and you were expected…
Read MoreIan Hunton recalls his special memories of working as a studio engineer
I have various memories. I remember being in studio twelve – the big studio – lining the cameras up. We were in colour then. It was for some Christmas spectacular, I think. They did those in August. I was there with the cameras and I turned around and they had a jazz orchestra on the…
Read MoreIan Hunton talks about working on ‘World in Action’
World in Action was a regular visitor, once a week. They would come in on Sunday morning. Once it had left film? Once it had left film. It would be on various tapes. They had their own offline editors. We’d get a box of tapes and a little edit decision list for the computer. The…
Read MoreIan Hunton talks about working on football programmes
The other things we did were things like the football – mainly, I think, because they knew I wasn’t particularly interested. They always seemed to choose me to do the football, because I never got involved in, ‘Who’s shooting what?’ and ‘Isn’t that a good goal? There was a football programme on Sunday night with…
Read MoreIan Hunton recalls the Granada canteen
The canteen was the hub. We used to have a tea break every morning and afternoon, and of course you’d go in for lunch, and if you were working late into the night you’d go in for your dinner as well. But it was the place where everybody went. All the turns went in there.…
Read MoreIan Hunton describes his work as an online editor
I never did film editing. All the editing then was called ‘online editing’. It was traditional. Because the online editing suite was so complicated – with videotape machines and the mixers – it was generally accepted that the people who got those jobs were ex-engineers. I decided after I’d had eighteen years doing the engineering…
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