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We currently have two fields. A Blue and a Red Field. These two fields are completely mirrored in their equipment so I will just talk about one field and you can assume we have double the equipment. I will stick to just the Video equipment since I don't do anything on the audio side. I'll see if I can bring someone in to talk about the audio later.

 

Our camera set up includes 3 Canon XA-20s. These cameras are decently cheap SDI-capable camcorders that allow for the operators to focus on framing and not about focus. We like them because they are small and easy to manipulate. THIS YEAR, this may change based on the field setup next year, we used two cameras on either side of the truss as our action cameras and then had one setup at the top of the stands as our full field camera for Autonomous and just for looking at the field.

 

These cameras are held up on some tripods with fluid heads. This year they bought all the equipment before I joined the team and bought some cheaper tripods and heads. DO NOT DO THIS! I can not stress how important it is to buy nice equipment in the long run. They also allow for nice footage if you buy something from manfrotto. In my personal line of work I prefer Really Right Stuff equipment, but their stuff is expensive and not for FIRST fields. I would suggest you look towards the Manfrotto 190 Series legs and the Manfrotto 500 Series Video Fluid Heads. The nice fluid cartridges will give you more... fluidy... movement.

 

The wireless camera you may have heard about before is Kevin Ross's. I don't know much about it other than it uses a nice broadcast lens that has a cool macro mode. If he wants to come out of his vacation for a bit we may get an explanation. Just using another XA-20 with a small steadicam-like rig. Not the whole arm and vest thing that I was running at champs, just the main stabilizer part. I'm trying to get some CAD files from 610's video guy...*cough*cough* Jacob Kachura *cough*sendmethefilescough* that could make building a nice, small steadicam much easier if they want to make it public. That would reduce cost by about $400ish.

 

Our streaming is run by many many cables that link together all the cameras and bring them to a big box that houses our computer and a set of Blackmagic ATEM Production Studio 4K switchers. These allow for us to easily switch between cameras with nice transitions. This box also allows for pass throughs and can send SDI cables to the projectors.

 

On the software side, we use Black Magic's proprietary software for switching and recording. This allows us to separate the two jobs and allows us to get the match videos up within 30 minutes of a match happening. We were also trying to have a full copy of each event, but that didn't go well this year.

 

Now I just talked about equipment, but there is more to a good stream than just the equipment. Like my mentor said to me before "The most important thing when taking a photo is the big thing looking through the viewfinder." (I actually focus on photography in case no one knew, I started videography this year). Getting a great set of volunteers who know the system and are willing to take responsibility for making the setup run smoothly is key. Training is a big part of why our streams are so impressive. Our volunteers are all interested in the game and media. This combination makes them dedicated to making the videos look great. Otherwise we would be like champs where we have great video, but the focus is so horrible that no one wants to watch it.

 

Communication is also key. We had a hard time with this since we were dealing with so much noise in the high school gyms that we were in. Our solution was to get a single side headset that gave us the freedom to plug our ears with an earplug or to listen to both our TD and someone next to us. Our communication protocols are going to change next year, but this year we had to wire a TON of XLR cables all around the field to get audio to all the headsets and that also required amplifiers for the signal. That shit may or may not be cheap, but it didn't look cheap.

 

Overall I thank Kevin and and the rest of the team, who I would list out here but it would take a while, for all the work that they have put in to get this to work out so well. Without such a dedicated community we never would have come this far and made a system to make FIRST even louder. Good luck to MAR, I can't wait to see more awesome live streams next year.