FRC Blog - 2014 Championship Pros & Cons

[dag0620]

Originally Posted by Hallry

Not only this, but also webcast quality. All of the webcasts for the PNW events this year were extraordinarily better than the NASA streams at WCMP, and from what I heard, the PNW webcasts were all student-ran. FIRST should take a look at what PNW is doing and make that the standard for their streams, especially those at the prestigious World Championship. PNW camera operators also were familiar with the game and were able to focus in on the actual action, rather than simply zooming in to the part of the field where the most robots were, which is what FIRST told the WCMP operators to do. The WCMP also had a lot of weird camera angles, especially on Einstein.

The problem with that is in PNW, all of the A/V is done in house, and ran by volunteers. While I applaud PNW for doing that, and their webcasts (and on site A/V from what I have been told) has been phenomenal, it's impractical for FIRST to do that on a large scale. A/V will have to continue to be contracted for a least the near future, and with that people who aren't as knowledgeable about the game will be working the cameras.

As for the actual quality of the streams, (not the footage being shown on them), FIRST needs to look at what PNW did, as well as some of the other events that had spectacular streams. Since A/V is already producing the content, I see no reason why FIRST can't come up with an easy, quality, standard way of getting that content on to a quality live stream. As for WCMP, NASA should have a much better way of doing this already, it's embarrassing that it can't be figured out.