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Formula 1 cameras ?


Otago
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I was watching the interview highlights on YouTube and was surprised to see high dynamic range and shallow depth of field in the drivers interviews after the race. Admittedly the last time I watched F1 it was 10 years ago ( they moved from free to view to Sky Sports and I didn't want a satellite dish just for F1! ) but it was definitely all clippy with deep depth of field. I can't find anything about the cameras and other broadcast stuff they use, anyone know ? The irony is that there's a camera man in the background of this video but I can't see because of the shallow depth of field : 

 

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4 hours ago, kye said:

My completely uneducated guess is that this could be any half-decent video / ENG camera.  Considering the ratio of subject distance to background distance, even a comparatively slow zoom lens would still get that kind of background blur, so I don't think it's an especially fast lens.

Yes, If it was 85mm for instance and the subject was about 10 feet from the camera, even at f8 the DOF would be just over a foot (APSC sized sensor) so anything well behind like in the above SHOULD be blurred.

 

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I agree that it could be a 2/3 camera ( and according to android lad it is! ) I haven't watched live tv recently and I noticed that it looked very different to what I was used to - why the change now if they were always capable of it ? 

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The Grass Valley LDX 86 B4 2/3" camera can do15-stops for live  broadcast with its HDR (software) option.  Here's a link to a US 4K HDR broadcast.  Maybe Europe is doing it as well.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/26/20884246/nfl-4k-hdr-broadcast-first-ever-fox-sports-thursday-night-football-streaming

So the new B4 cameras and HDR broadcast standards are making higher dynamic range live broadcast possible and that may explain the difference (improvement) noted above.

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4 hours ago, Otago said:

I agree that it could be a 2/3 camera ( and according to android lad it is! ) I haven't watched live tv recently and I noticed that it looked very different to what I was used to - why the change now if they were always capable of it ? 

No actual knowledge about this, but this is the internet so I'm pretty sure outright guesswork is allowed..    Firstly, people are becoming very highly visually educated and know what they like and what the various aesthetics are.  People know that blurry backgrounds look 'professional' and many of them know about composition etc.  Even if they don't know about these things consciously, they know a good image when they see it.  Images are everywhere, and not only that, but really good images are everywhere.  With all the billboards, TV ads, TV shows, movies, and image-heavy social media accounts from brands and influencers, people are seeing high-quality images like they've never seen before in history.  Almost everyone with a smart-phone can now tell that the photos of their family on facebook aren't the same as the other images they see.

My point is that TV stations know this and can cater to it.

Secondly, I think that TV stations are putting more money into live events like sport, over fictional material.  The great boom of reality TV was partly because it's hugely cheaper to make than narrative content, and I have heard that with advancing technology (and some channels even going to 1080p60!!) the focus is on sports.  For the price of renting a better camera you can get HD content on air very quickly and easily (or at least, with basically the same speed and cost of it being SD) and my dad, who still consumes free-to-air TV here in Australia, says that the vast majority of HD content broadcast is sports, so it makes sense that they'd choose to upgrade this.

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i watched bathurst on tv on sunday. ( its like formula 1, but australian and better ?) i was actually a bit disappointed with the amount of moire or aliasing visible, didn't seem to matter what the shot was either. anyone else notice or am i being overly picky ?  I do know its a live event and some materials are prone to it however i reckon i noticed alot more this year. Maybe you guys are starting to rub off on me ?

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I'm not sure about the F1 example, but I've worked on the broadcast for an international sporting event series where Red cinema cameras are integrated into the broadcast. There's essentially two camera teams working side by side. 

Broadcast cameras (including specialty slow-mo cameras) cover all the action & interviews for the live stream.

Red cameras get better quality coverage for heat highlights/daily highlights, promos, sponsor/partnerships content, athlete profiles, social content, archival etc.

The Red content is ingested and edited on site so packages can be integrated into the live broadcast, sometimes with very fast turn around times. I'm talking really fast - eg following a good match-up, an interview plus some b-roll & might be shot and within an hour edited into a package (including action highlights) and ready for broadcast.

I'm sure there's plenty of sports leagues around the world doing the same thing, and I've definitely seen plenty of Red's and Arri's in the background when watching sports broadcasts. Anyone who's worked in a live sports broadcast knows that a lot of content that appears to be live is actually delayed, (eg post-match interviews might be recorded during a commercial break immediately after the final buzzer and played back "as-live" 20 mins later after lots of post-match commentary/breakdown) so it's quite plausible that this sort of content could be shot on a Red, ingested, and played out as-live without anyone even realising.

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8 hours ago, leslie said:

i watched bathurst on tv on sunday. ( its like formula 1, but australian and better ?) i was actually a bit disappointed with the amount of moire or aliasing visible, didn't seem to matter what the shot was either. anyone else notice or am i being overly picky ?  I do know its a live event and some materials are prone to it however i reckon i noticed alot more this year. Maybe you guys are starting to rub off on me ?

Bathurst, the craziest circuit ever (with the exception from Avus, I guess). Love it.

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2 hours ago, barefoot_dp said:

The Red content is ingested and edited on site so packages can be integrated into the live broadcast, sometimes with very fast turn around times. I'm talking really fast - eg following a good match-up, an interview plus some b-roll & might be shot and within an hour edited into a package (including action highlights) and ready for broadcast.

I'm sure there's plenty of sports leagues around the world doing the same thing, and I've definitely seen plenty of Red's and Arri's in the background when watching sports broadcasts. Anyone who's worked in a live sports broadcast knows that a lot of content that appears to be live is actually delayed, (eg post-match interviews might be recorded during a commercial break immediately after the final buzzer and played back "as-live" 20 mins later after lots of post-match commentary/breakdown) so it's quite plausible that this sort of content could be shot on a Red, ingested, and played out as-live without anyone even realising.

Makes sense.  I watched a reality TV show on Netflix about some freelance ENG guys called Shot In The Dark and the pace that these guys could edit was impressive.  If anyone hasn't seen that it's pretty cool to watch.

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2 hours ago, kye said:

Makes sense.  I watched a reality TV show on Netflix about some freelance ENG guys called Shot In The Dark and the pace that these guys could edit was impressive.  If anyone hasn't seen that it's pretty cool to watch.

Getting the cellular upload bandwidth to file the videos impressed me more !

The original series of the same guys from 2008 is an interesting insight into how the camera technology moved on in the intervening decade or so.

 

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6 hours ago, Márcio Kabke Pinheiro said:

Bathurst, the craziest circuit ever 

I have been around that place decades ago as a passenger in a VW Kombi....some of the scariest moments of my life (it is a public road when not racing).

 

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3 hours ago, noone said:

I have been around that place decades ago as a passenger in a VW Kombi....some of the scariest moments of my life (it is a public road when not racing).

 

so what did the kombi max out at, hitting conrod straight ? ?

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9 hours ago, Márcio Kabke Pinheiro said:

Bathurst, the craziest circuit ever (with the exception from Avus, I guess). Love it.

I dunno, I'd say Isle of Mann is a pretty crazy course with all their deaths....

 

9 hours ago, kye said:

Makes sense.  I watched a reality TV show on Netflix about some freelance ENG guys called Shot In The Dark and the pace that these guys could edit was impressive.  If anyone hasn't seen that it's pretty cool to watch.


That reminds me, I need to see that!

Watched the fictional "Nightcrawler", would be good to see the "reality" version of it. 

 

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1 hour ago, leslie said:

so what did the kombi max out at, hitting conrod straight ? ?

I can not remember it was that long ago....probably was not all that fast since it had the aerodynamics of a brick and besides I was too terrified to notice anyway...early 1980s.

 

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1 hour ago, noone said:

I can not remember it was that long ago....probably was not all that fast since it had the aerodynamics of a brick and besides I was too terrified to notice anyway...early 1980s.

No excuses....  someone managed to get a van around the Nurburgring in under 10 minutes!

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/sabines-nurburgring-van-record-has-been-broken

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