ZOOM OUT!

[Roger]

To respond to AV_guy007:

Originally Posted by AV_guy007

The problem you guys may not seem to realize is doing all of these things take up a lot of resources.

Sorta like building a robot, huh?

Originally Posted by AV_guy007

Sargent productions has a crew at every regional,...

At which they should be practicing like the rest of us, understanding the game, learning where the good camera shots are, knowing how to present a fast moving robot to people that don't want artsy photography.

Originally Posted by AV_guy007

... for them to add more camera operators and or a video mixer is a lot of money. During weeks with a lot of regional's and a champs Sargents crew is already pretty spread thin, running 4 fields plus Einstein plus vex and FLL adds up to a lot of video people and equipment, adding another video mixer and video feed to each field doubles the amount of video mixers that are hired and doubles the amount of video equipment needed.

Waitaminute -- they get paid? <raised-eyebrow smilie>

I'm sorry for sounding so snarky about this, but after watching FIRST videos for too many years one should expect improvement. Look, you got vet teams that are so good they have to change the robot rules in unexpectant ways to keep them in line with the newbies. And these are high school kids. Kids that managed in six weeks to build and ship a complex machine. And in spite of a 2" thick rulebook managed to find unexpected loopholes. And a professional video team can't present a game?

I grant you that it is difficult to keep the camera on the action. There is no singular "action" -- no ball, you might say, to keep an eye on. Even in football where you don't know which way the ball will go, you have to hope for the best. But unlike football where the action converges on the ball, the action here spreads out. Which means a whole-field shot.

Don Wright's example is typical, except he forgot to mention having an overall shot at the end. I don't know if the video was cut short at the end or what, but I would like to see the final carnage of all the robots.