Improving Online Content, Looking Forward in FIRST, & Tutorial Requests

[GreyingJay]

What makes videos good?

1. Use a tripod. (Or a stabilizer with a gimbal, but tripods are cheaper.)

2. Use an external microphone.

Those two things alone would clean up the vast majority of unwatchable videos on the Internet.

[TheMilkman01]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

1. Use a tripod. (Or a stabilizer with a gimbal, but tripods are cheaper.)
2. Use an external microphone.

Those are definitely two of the most key components for creating well-crafted videos. Even if the premise isn't attention grabbing, it automatically ups the quality. Here're two more fundamentals:

1. Know your camera. You should be comfortable with it and understand its features like the lens, focus, aperture, and shutter speed. The more you feel familiar with it, the better you will become at photography and filming.

2. Don't shoot video thinking you can "fix it post." Come up with a plan, or at least know your vision, and shoot the best you can when you have the camera to maximize how it looks on the video editing screen.

[C.Lesco]

I personally really like the recap videos, robot replays and the 8 bit gifs of robots that you can use for your profile picture (where can I get one made btw) but I think media is a massive part of first and getting the word out there. Keeping in mind I have no idea about the politics, I'd think that expanding to TV for some worlds events would be a cool way to expand media.

[AllenGregoryIV]

I've been thinking a lot about this topic recently. Not only in increasing production video quality and quantity but also live stream and at event time as well. That is what led to this thread, that quickly got too technical and not big picture.

Largely for me this comes down to how do we better utilize the 5 mins between matches. We have the majority of competition days basically wasted on the live streams and in arena for people who aren't on teams.

My favorite current answers to this problem is better produced video and replay highlights of matches.

1. I'd like to see chairman's videos and behind the bumpers type segments made by teams (or produced at the event) played at events. We need to celebrate both the culture change teams are driving for and the robot design process. These two video ideas would cover that. Teams spend many hours each year working on their Chairman's Award videos that may never be seen unless they win, this just doesn't make sense. We are largely ignoring the best produced content by most teams.

2. Instant relays this is more a technology problem. If we could work out a way to properly do instant relay and not just of the camera angle already shown on the projector/stream could be very engaging for a lot of people.

If we start celebrating well produced video content at events by showing them off, more teams will produce them.

To specifically answer your question.
Videos that I would like to see made.

• As many robot explanation, behind the bumpers, videos as possible.
• Event highlight, recap videos, explain what happened at each event similar to Robozone in FiM. They should be short 1-2 mins each. It would be great to have a playlist each week that just ran down the events with highlights. We would probably need someone at each event to do it so we really know what happened like a reporter.
• Commercial like videos that can be played quickly(30 secs) to get people interested in learning more about FRC