- This topic has 12 replies, 10 voices, and was last updated 2 years, 2 months ago by
.
- Posts
Is it actually televising horse RACING to do this?
Has driven me mad ever since the days of C4 Racing tbh.
I want to see as many of the field on screen as possible at any given time.
A horse in isolation conveys no information, perspective or context whatsoever.
Thoughts?
I am "The Horse Racing Punter" on Facebook
https://mobile.twitter.com/Ian_Davies_
https://www.facebook.com/ThePointtoPointNHandFlatracingpunter/
It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"Agree. It was poor in the Denman Chase when the camera focussed on Shishkin even when he was only in second place.
Just asking myself the same. The camera focussed a lot more on Shishkin than on the leader and Bartlett isn’t a big help either. The one with the bad mistake four or five out in the 1.30 was On The Blind Side (who lost a few places after his mistake) and not Judicial Law (who was still alongside the leader Kyntara).
Got no problem if there’s a reason for it.
Focusing on Shishkin at the / soon after the start is imo good. Mid-race much less so, but as long as it’s done very quickly. o.k.Value Is EverythingWhat always annoys me is when they only show the leaders going over jumps in the early stages if a race.
Sadly race coverage was perfected several decades ago. Therein lies the problem.
The prevailing attitude of the broadcasters dictates that they have to regularly provide something different, something that demonstrates innovation or progress. If they don’t, their audience will soon tire of the same old staid pictures and turn their ever shortening attention span to more dynamic sports such as snooker, golf, bowls, or maybe just lapse into a coma. Or so they seem to think.
Zooming in on any particular horse or horses is, as Ian states, of no value during the running of the race. If anything is worthy of detailed examination, this can be addressed after the race, during the seemingly obligatory race analysis.
Let’s consider some of the other debatable improvements broadcasters have dreamt up recently:
Jockeycams: Looking at the back of the horses head, or the backside of the preceding horse. Isn’t this something we’ve all been crying out for?
On screen turf graphics: Well the French do it, so we’ll have to do it too. Fantastic, never bothered looking at those furlong posts, what are they there for? I must admit for the last 50 years I’ve never had the courage to ask someone where the finishing line is. Why? Because it’s so bleeding obvious! OK, go on then, put a nice thick ten yard wide graphic where we all know it is, that’ll really help us. Well at least they seemed to have worked out how to stop them moving these days, which I suppose could be considered progress. Actually it’s just slightly less annoying.
Airship/Drone Cameras: Let’s place a camera hundreds of feet up in the air (because we can), this necessitates zooming in on the leaders to get a worthwhile picture, thus ignoring what may be happening towards the back of the field – Great job, certainly helped your viewers there.
On Screen Graphical Clutter: Well that Turftrax experiment went well didn’t it? Thanks Ch4, we so loved not having the race in full screen. Watching horses names going up and down the side of the tv screen and speed data along the bottom was unbelievably exciting. (I actually stopped watching Ch4 for several years because of this).
Not to worry, we‘ve now got race time, course (just in case you didn’t know which race you were watching), how many obstacles there are to jump (sneakily changing before half the field has cleared them just to make you think), race duration and sectional data for the last 2 furlongs. Brilliant, we just didn’t know what we were missing did we?
Sadly, we can’t see horses further back in the field as they are obscured by this superfluous data in the top left hand corner, but hey it’s just a horse race, you don’t want to actually see horses racing do you?Roving/Hand held cameras: Sky are particularly guilty here. Presumably an attempt to enhance the viewer experience by replicating the feeling of being at the course, Aaaaaagghhhhh.
Infield tracking cameras: I will concede that these, when employed in the right circumstances on the larger courses, have indeed enhanced coverage. However, we have been getting a bit carried away recently haven’t we? Using them down the home straight at Chepstow, Doncaster and Uttoxeter does not work. You have perfectly good fixed camera positions that keep the majority of the field in vision. The tracking cameras do not – stop it, now!
I’ll refrain from delving into the specifics around the Grand National coverage as I need to calm down before bedtime.
In summary – just show as many horses as possible for the whole race, including crossing the finishing line.
Everything else, put it behind the red button as an optional extra, as they do with F1. Then provide the data to show how many viewers actually access it. I suspect most of these “innovations” would then be rapidly dispensed with.....and you've got to look a long way back for anything else.
Great posting imo.
I’m sure many of us remember the fixed camera positions BBC and ITV had back in the 1970s and could even tell you when they were about to switch from one to another.
It never changed year on year because it didn’t need to – they’d long since cracked it.
Then in come the arty luvvie idiots in pursuit of media awards that have zero to do with what serves the viewer and everything to do with being different for the sake of change and in many ways we actually now have worse picture coverage than 40-50 years ago, which is pretty astonishing really.
I am "The Horse Racing Punter" on Facebook
https://mobile.twitter.com/Ian_Davies_
https://www.facebook.com/ThePointtoPointNHandFlatracingpunter/
It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"Camera operators covering racing don’t know anything about racing and
don’t want to be doing it. Just got to look at the output to realise that most see themselves as pop video geniuses with that Emmy in mind. Problem is that broadcasters don’t understand what’s required either and don’t sanction them or, more likely, don’t see anything wrong with shots of horses’ arses disappearing over an open ditch.Fantastic post espmadrid.
Although I agree there is a lot of unnecessary screen clutter and insufficient focus on the entire field in modern coverage, I don’t ever recall a time where things were perfect. Coverage of horses crossing the line other than the winner never seems to have been particularly good.
The angle which shows the water jump at Newbury is catastrophic. It used to be great in the 90s and maybe even a few years later, when you saw the entire obstacle and the water. Nowadays horses are shown from the front and you need the commentator to tell you they’re jumping the water.
The French (Auteuil) are a lot better, you see the entire water jump, the gros open ditch, the bullfinch and so from different perspectives. They present the entire dynamics of a race at a much superior level.
The drones used at Vincennes (trotting) provide you with quite impressive shots as well.Newbury started the meeting with a wrong going description and kept it unchanged for the entire day, with a lame commentator and with poor camera angles.
In line with Ian’s remarks on the old National coverage, I can remember going back probably 25 years ago, they used to have some absolutely beautiful camera angles when they covered Cheltenham festival, there were a couple in particular that always gave me shivers. Nowadays there’s a lot of meetings where I seem to spend half my time wondering what’s going on in different places, where the rest of the field are, etc.
I think this zooming in nonsense started with C4 Racing back in the 90s and it’s hard to understand why we live in a world where the entire production team isn’t in jail serving full life terms for perpetrating this heinous act.
All joking (or am I? as Vic Reeves might have said) aside, who among us at the races would choose to zoom in on just one horse to the exclusion of all others?
At the races, I find an elevated position opposite the winning post so I can see as much as possible and that’s what any outside broadcast should be looking to replicate.
I am "The Horse Racing Punter" on Facebook
https://mobile.twitter.com/Ian_Davies_
https://www.facebook.com/ThePointtoPointNHandFlatracingpunter/
It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.