This video was made possible by Brilliant. Learn complex subjects through bite-sized,
approachable chunks for 20% off at Brilliant.org/Wendover. Most do not accurately consider just how difficult
a task live television broadcasting is. In a matter of seconds, video has to be captured,
produced, directed, and transmitted as far as the other side of the world. That’s difficult enough, but when something
appears on actual, broadcast TV, the degree of quality expected in terms of capture, production,
direction, and transmission is quite high. Nowadays, live television isn’t anything
tremendously unique or novel, but the extent of work that goes on behind the scenes to
make it happen is truly greater than ever. This is everything that happens in those seven
seconds between when something actually happens, and when it reaches your living room. Now, there are certainly degrees of complexity
in terms of live broadcasting, and there are also certainly varying degrees to which the
work is actually conducted live, especially between the two primary genres of live TV. Of course, the first of those two is news. Channels like CNN, the BBC, or Al Jazeera
broadcast almost all of their shows live globally, however, they typically don’t complete all
four steps of capturing, producing, directing, and transmitting live. Most news shows are produced in the hours
leading up to going live, with staff writing stories and creating a line-up ahead of time—except
in the case of breaking news—and the anchor is essentially just performing it live. This is still an incredibly impressive task
which involves a massive time crunch, but its not the most live form of the two primary
genres of live TV. What that would be is sports. Sports broadcasting truly requires live capture,
production, direction, and transmission. A non-scripted, non-predictable sequence of
actions happens and then, in the seconds that follow, a team of people needs to string them
together into a story with their choice of camera angles, cuts, graphics, commentary,
and more. Just as there are varying degrees of complexity
between news and sports broadcasting, different sports precipitate different broadcasting
styles. In the case of most team sports, such as football,
soccer, baseball, basketball, rugby, and more, there’s one ball and therefore one center
of action on one field. Now, again, broadcasting these sports live
is certainly not an easy task, but it is somewhat aided by the fact of one center of action
and one field that can be shown all at once. This however, is not the case in all sports. In Formula 1, for example, there are some
20 drivers spread out across a miles long track each simultaneously competing to overtake
a different driver, and the cameras can only show a few at a time. That means its a far greater task to craft
this sport into a cohesive narrative of ups and downs, drama and heartbreak, and winners
and losers—and it still all happens live. In addition, each Formula 1 race is broadcast
to some 87 million people across more than 100 countries—it’s one of the most global
sports out there—meaning it has to be disseminated and localized to each of those more than 100
television markets simultaneously. This is everything that happens, on each race
Sunday, during the seven seconds separating the camera and the viewer. Formula 1’s 2021, 23 race season is spread
out across 23 unique tracks, in 22 different countries, on five different continents, meaning
each needs a unique camera setup. For the most part, though, there’s a common
formula. Some 24 cameras with human operators are set
up around the track, and they’re tasked exclusively with capturing the action actually
on the track. Then, in the pit lane, about 6 roaming pit
cameras, also operated by humans, capture both pit stops themselves and the reactions
of the pit crews and team management to different happenings in the race. There’s also what’s referred to as a CamCat—a
high-speed, remote operated camera mounted to a long cable—that runs along the main
straightaway, where the race starts, and the pit lane. Then, there’s a helicopter with a team of
two—the pilot and camera operator—that captures aerial shots. In addition, each car is outfitted with between
three and five onboard cameras, depending on the driver’s average performance and
therefore how much they’re likely to be on TV. In addition, there are dozens of additional
small, static, remote-operated cameras hidden in spots like the track curbs and around each
pit stall. All in all, there are more than 100 cameras
at each track. Now, what happens after those 100 cameras
capture those 100 different live images is somewhat unique, in the context of Formula
1, because in many ways, they’re leading the way in terms of the technical innovation
of sports broadcasting. It used to be that, at a given Formula 1 race,
Premier League match, NFL game, or other broadcasted sports event, a TV truck would sit physically
onsite, at the event, with the director and their team cutting together the broadcast
feed. Then, that feed would be passed over to a
satellite truck which would transmit it up into space, to a television satellite, which
would then send it back down to an earth station connected to a main broadcast facility, which
would disseminate it out to different TV providers. That method has worked for decades, but it
certainly has its disadvantages. For one, having a large, mobile team physically
travel to each event has quite a large monetary and environmental cost. In addition, satellite transmission is expensive,
because satellites are expensive, and is subject to reliability issues during rain, thunderstorms,
and certain other weather events. Therefore, Formula 1 has switched to a new
system that’s expected, by many, to be part of the future of sports broadcasting. While the change had been long planned to
happen eventually, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed Formula 1 to implement it early in 2020. With the start of that year’s season, the
only broadcast staff now actually on-site, at each track, are the camera operators, the
technical staff, a small number of production staff, and assorted others. The vast majority of the higher-level production
staff, the people who take raw footage and string it into something fit for broadcast,
are hundreds or thousands of miles away at Formula One Management’s headquarters in
Biggin Hill, just south of London. In order to reduce the amount of people and
freight that travel the world to each race, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic where
each human is a potential vector for the virus, the directors and their teams work remotely
from Biggin Hill to actually produce the race. Now, the difficulty with this approach is
that, previously, a hundred or so on-site cameras were cut down to one broadcast feed
onsite, meaning only one live video feed had to be transmitted onwards to a broadcast facility. That’s difficult enough itself, as a live
4K video feed requires a lot of bandwidth to transmit, but now, all of those 100 or
so camera feeds have to be transmitted to Biggin Hill so they can be cut into the broadcast
feed. That’s quite a lot more data. Transmitting all of that via satellite would
be an enormous challenge, and enormously expensive. Therefore, Formula 1 has struck up a partnership
with Tata Communications. Now, Tata Communications is a different type
of communications company than, say, for example, Comcast or BT. These consumer-facing companies often own
and operate much of the infrastructure that connects homes and businesses to the internet
but they don’t own or operate the infrastructure that, say, takes data from a server in the
UK to a user in the US—they’re just the last-mile providers. Tata Communications, meanwhile, which is known
as a Tier 1 network provider, deals with long distance transmission between states, countries,
and continents. These providers own incredibly expensive global
networks of submarine and terrestrial cables that each move huge quantities of data, and
providers like BT and Comcast simply pay transit fees to use these Tier 1 providers’ infrastructure. Since Tata Communications directly owns and
operates this infrastructure, they can guarantee, with confidence, a certain tranche of bandwidth
on the cable that stretches the majority of the distance between, for example, the Albert
Park Circuit in Melbourne, Australia, and the Formula One Management Facility in Biggin
Hill, UK. With a technical support team from Tata Communications
that travels on-site to each race, they’re able to guarantee a near perfect level of
reliability, far greater than that of consumer internet, meaning this method gets the enormous
amount of data that makes up more than 100 4K video feeds transmitted across the world
in real-time, at a lower cost than satellite transmission. Of course, once the data arrives in Biggin
Hill, the job is to take these 100 plus feeds of raw video and string them together into
watchable, produced television. To do that, the Executive Director has to
cut between each of those cameras, but that’s far too many cameras feed for one person to
manage. Therefore, they’re divided up into a number
of sub-feeds. Now, for F1, the primary sub-feed is what’s
referred to as the “Track Mix.” This feed, which is the only one still produced
on-site, has its own dedicated director who works closely with the Executive Director
in Biggin Hill. It uses all of those 24 trackside cameras,
and so the Executive Director might say they want to focus on an overtake battle between
the race leaders—say Hamilton from Mercedes and Verstappen of Red Bull. The Track Mix director will then tell their
camera operators to focus on those drivers, and pan to follow them as they pass. But then, the Executive Director might say
he wants to visually reestablish the race order, so the Track Mix director will tell
a camera operator to keep their camera pointed up the track, and not follow any driver, so
that each of the cars passes by. The Track Mix director, with their team, will
then pick which of the 24 cameras to use at any given time—switching between them in
order, for example, if they’re focusing on an overtake battle between two drivers—so
that the Executive Director receives one produced feed following the action that they’re choosing
to focus on at any given time. But while that’s the primary one, there
are plenty of other sub-feeds. For example, an independent team works on
replays—isolating moments and queuing them up for the Executive Director. Another works on isolating interesting moments
from the team’s communications radio channels, then most of the other cameras—such as the
roaming pit cams, the helicopter cam, the CamCat, and the rest—are offered up to the
director as individual sub-feeds since they’re used less frequently. With all of these, the Executive Director
and their team must choose what’s relevant to show at any given moment—whether its
the race leaders, or a pit-stop, or a spin-out by a driver towards the back. With so much happening at once, the director
has to pick and choose a few key narratives to follow—potentially an underdog over-performing,
or a car that’s starting to fail, or a top performer making their way to the front—and
choose the moments that fit those narratives to broadcast. The director will call out the feeds they
want live, as well as what they want from feeds that are not yet live, and then their
team will actually implement those actions. The output from Biggin Hill, known as the
World Feed, is exactly what you see on TV, except for one crucial element. You see, as Formula 1 is broadcasts to more
than 100 countries globally, each with one or potentially multiple broadcasters carrying
the race, it would be absolute chaos if each had its own production team actually on-site,
at each race, capturing, producing, and broadcasting the action. That’s why the Formula One Group itself
handles almost all the broadcast production themselves, and provides the World Feed for
its clients—different national broadcasters. For the purposes of localization, though,
the World Feed is provided to the broadcasters without commentary, and it’s up to them
to add that on. In fact, for the most part, broadcasters are
not allowed to cut away from the World Feed at all during the main race—they can’t
add their own replays, camera inserts, or anything. However, the advantage of this system overall
is that every viewer globally, whether they’re in a huge TV market like the US or a tiny
one like Lithuania, will have a consistent, quality viewing experience. At this step of the process, the path the
broadcast takes to the final viewer depends—sometimes TV is transmitted to consumers by cable, sometimes
by satellite, and sometimes it arrives via the internet. Regardless, thanks to the work of hundreds
of people spread out across timezones, the final viewer will receive a fully produced,
high quality video of something that happened just about seven seconds ago, somewhere on
earth. The way live broadcast television works is
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Best F1 broadcast I've seen was that bloke on Periscope that livestreamed the whole 2016 preseason testing from the grandstands in barcelona using his phone.
Best quote of the whole video "The executive director and their team must choose what's relevant to show at any given moment, wether it's the race leaders, or a pitstop, or a spinout by a driver towards the back."
Last time they talked about directors, I think it was mentioned they have multiple directors watching multiple things and then sharing what they think should be shown. But yeah, its a complex thing and there's lots of stuff involved.
Its too bad that this wasn't a collaboration with F1, otherwise the footage shown would be more relevant and less stock-video.mp4
The question is: Does this video contain planes?
I’m a camera operator in live sports and can absolutely say that it’s mayhem, especially massive broadcasts like this. They definitely nailed it on the head. The things directors, executive directors, broadcast staff, everyone have to do to broadcast an event is insane. As a viewer you never know until you see for yourself, and people love to pick it apart but don’t realize the planning and effort that goes into it. Definitely gives you a whole new respect once you’ve been in the other side of it
I think this video from germany does a good job at showing the chaos the TV directors face I really hope F1 does one for Imola and Hamilton going off and the bottas-Russell crash
(203) How TV Directors Captured the Action in Germany - YouTube
This is very interesting in light of the recent "technical issues" during the FP1 broadcast for Imola. We were only getting the "track mix", produced onsite (without all the individual roaming/cat-cam/onboard feeds/replays, which are mixed in offsite at Biggin Hill).
Notice at 9:55 he put the 2nd Red Bull way in the back. Also only 1 Mclaren, but 3 Alfa Romeros!
Gotta love Wendover