Nobody likes it when Champs does it. Nobody likes it when various Districts or regionals do it. Remote scouts hate it. FTC teams hate it. It’s by far and away the easiest way to overproduce an event for negative gain. It takes away from the flow and focus that your average viewer has already determined from themselves for a given match, and puts it entirely outside their agency, which makes it absolutely infuriating because everyone watching a given match is likely watching different teams. It gets even worse when the camera crew has deer-in-headlights syndrome and spends 10 seconds hovering over an immobile robot while the other side is performing a 6-ball auto or something.
If you’re doing AV for an FTC event this year, i ask please please please please please always provide a static view. New Jersey does it right. Washington State doesn’t.
Why hasn’t this been addressed throughout the entire program?
This is true for all programs BTW.
While the zoomed in view can give you other angles on the action( which is cool sometimes), I would never ever choose to watch it over the wide angle. Personally, I think the best way it’s been implemented is in the 2018 frc champs-splitting the screen so you don’t lose anything and getting the two static zoomed angles + one moving camera that just takes the “cool” shots. In any case, any event that for some reason can’t split screens like this should definitely stick only to the wide angle
I suspect that years ago someone very high up in FIRST, who had never been on a team, decided that closeup shots made event video streams look more polished and exciting for an outside viewer. Given the almost universal unpopularity of the livestream format, I expect the staying power of the format is due to a very strong willed and powerful person in the organization. I truly have no idea who this might be. Just reading between the lines. As the shift has been made towards districts, which have more power to make their own decisions and who tend to be run by people who have team experience, more and more full field static feeds are available.
My other suspicion is that it’s not really so much active hostility as much as incompetence – the zoom-in shots are for the benefit of the live audience (as this same view is displayed on the big screen above the field), and this works as the live audience has full view of the field. Unfortunately, the stream only gets this secondary camera instead of both it and the full view.
Hot Take. Perhaps events do this because most people actually like it? Whenever events have two streams, one that’s produced and one that’s full field, I’ve never seen more viewers on the full field vs the produced one. Perhaps not everyone thinks the same way as the CD hive mind.
Is it for full documentation of exactly what happened on the field?
Is it for telling the story of the struggles and successes of the team on the field?
Is it for entertaining one or more audiences?
Does it teach people where to look, or let them choose where to look?
And, as others alluded to… how will different people in charge of directing these livestreams answer?
Historically, all A/V at events has been for the benefit of the live in-person audience there. The whole “production” is all about the people who are physically there, like the MCs and Game Announcers don’t really chat “to the people at home” beyond a cursory mention if that, they’re focused on trying to make the event exciting for those there. It’s really only been in recent years that one could expect it to be broadcast online as well. (Well, I’m using “recent” from an adult’s perspective, I suppose current students wouldn’t have much knowledge of the world being any other way.) So, once could you start counting on venues having Internet available and somebody wanted to put together the effort to try to get something online, the easiest thing to do was to take that same video feed going to the main screen (which again, was designed for people in the in-person audience) and try to get that broadcast, rather than needing more equipment/volunteers/etc. to try to get there being two views of things, one for the people there and one for people online.
Now, with the world having more and more “streaming” stuff every day, and with events having attendance restrictions nowadays, I think there’s being more of an effort to solve those problems and ensure that remote viewers get the experience that they might need as well, especially as teams might be scouting remotely and such. But it just wasn’t that long ago that you’d be lucky to have an online stream at all, and change takes time, especially for events that are all volunteer-driven. If you have expertise in running event webcasts, it’s highly likely that your local events would love to have you help volunteer to make theirs better.
Its because people try to make it an “AV project” and make it dramatic while missing other actions. All we want is Robot Gameplay. Leave artistic expressions with Hollywood.
When our team films events we have one static full field camera and another “follow” camera. They have different uses. If I only had one I’d get more use out of the full one but if you can do both it provides different value and audiences.
For the first year ever, we’re considering doing remote scouting because of possible event restrictions on number of team members allowed in the facility (and our own travel issues). Because of the issue highlighted by this post, we’re considering whether to do what we’ve seen Tators do at events we attend; and that’s to have a camera (or two?) on a tripod in the stands. I assume they send the footage back to Tator-HQ via some cellular data stream for remote scouting and possibly for their HQ based programmers to debug issues.
If we knew the event A/V wasn’t going to be over-produced, we’d know we didn’t have to think about bringing our own cameras and fronting the cost of a really expensive data plan.
