[kgargiulo]

Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard

+1
And for Championships, get a broadcast like the one for the Michigan State Championship going on Saturday. MSC is incredible to watch, even with this year's game due to the incredible production value put into the event.

This. Although the thread name is "the negative" I want to pick up on MSC as a positive example to contrast to.

I was stunned by the high quality of the MSC broadcast. The video resolution, the angles, the field of view, the commentators... it was all incredibly professionally done and a credit to the people who arranged it and did the work. I'm in the "great engineering challenge, weak spectator sport" camp regarding this year's game, but the MSC broadcast even made a positive difference on that front.

My team was on Curie this year and for quite a while at the start of Quals there was no field audio. Period. In Q1 the robots started auto and no one off the field knew it was coming. The audio on Curie sometimes alternated between deafening and inaudible, but once it was fixed it was generally ok. I appreciate that the production team must have had to work hard to fix an unanticipated problem that somehow got past testing. Anyone who's worked on a robot understands that pressure and frustration. However a working PA system has to be table stakes when we've got people on line and in the stands who we are trying to get interested in FIRST and STEM as mentors, volunteers, sponsors, or any other angle.

Einstein audio was unintelligible (no exaggeration) in the upper decks for most of the intro speeches due to a severe echo. The echo was briefly fixed by making the volume nearly inaudible. Eventually it was sorted out, and the match calls were fine. I do not know if that early problem was limited to the dome, the area of the dome where we sat, or affected the webcasts as well. Same point as for Curie. That kind of problem with the blocking and tackling of the PA system doesn't help new people get hooked.


Disclosure: I work for PTC, a FIRST Crown Sponsor. Opinions expressed here are mine alone.