Spent the day following some of the FIRST Regional competitions online again. The Toronto Regional was fun to watch because I know so many of the teams. But in typical internet fashion, after the lunch break, the feed went to crap.
It started out with a good feed, the video was clear as can be expected, but you could tell it was a token effort by Discovery.ca. One camera angle that never changed and the audio went on and off like they just cranked up a noise gate. Nothing kills the excitement of a robotics match like silence whenever the announcer isn’t talking.
(I read a posting on Chief Delphi, an unofficial FIRST robotics forum, that the TV crews had been cut back drastically due to economic cutbacks. They were probably lucky to get them there at all. Many of the regional video coverage isn’t done professionally at all, just put up on ustream or Stickam.)
But once they got into the final rounds, the connection got really spotty. The video was so bad you couldn’t see anything in the score area and the robots were blurry. That is when you got it at all. I switched to the Palmetto Regional for a while just because it was watchable. They were being fed out of Clemson Univ. and the quality was better. They had the same woman announcer as we had at Philadelphia. Continue Reading…