Baseball's Fake Audience - Your Thoughts
- Thread starter Paul F
- Start date
puredrifting
Major Contributor
For sure. We are doing a panel discussion rehearsal makeup today for a live stream scheduled for Thursday of this week. Last weeks rehearsal with the panelists had to be canceled when both of our ISPs had problems. Both Spectrum Business Class (primary) and then AT&T (backup) both
had weird anomalies (Data packet loss) that caused our system to not be able to work, even Speedtest.net was showing perfect data rates and flow. We were getting service, it's just that the ISPs servers were dishing out corrupt data. Weird problem we've never enountered before.
Not happy clients and panelists, we stayed up all night trying to figure out what the failure points were, it was rough. We tested with the clients yesterday and it worked perfectly, re-doing the rehearsal today with the panelists and client, fingers crossed. It's so frustrating when you do
your job well, have a Plan B and even though you have Plan B, Plan A and B don't work. We are trying to develop a plan C but like most places in the United States, you can only get Internet service from a max of two providers. so not sure what a Plan C is looking like?
MLB produces the sounds and they are heard in the stadium. They didn't say who controls the sounds other than saying the MLB. This is fed to the broadcasters who can additionally sweeten the sound, so Fox says. But they didn't say how. Since MLB controls the sounds, not sure what the broadcasters would do on top of what MLB does. They must have some agreement about that.
MLB has about 75 sounds and reactions. No boos or jeers.
What's going on with 5G mobile? Given its bandwidth and low latency, on paper, it looks good. Have you seen it offered for use?
CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
Seeing cardboard cutouts in the stands of a baseball stadium definitely brings back some memories. I worked on two baseball movies a couple of decades ago ("Major League 3" and "Mr. 3000") and we used cutouts for seat filling on both. Sometimes they'd sprinkle a few real humans amongst the cutouts to give some movement, depending on how far away the crowd was. We never had enough cutouts to fill the whole stadium so we'd move them from section to section. As the operator I'd give notes to one of the AD's on the parameters of the frame and a small army of people would shlep them into place. By 2003 when we were doing "Mr. 3000" the VFX option was more available but it still came with enough cost that we had to mix and match techniques. Sometimes when we were figuring out shots I'd have to add up how many sections of stadium we were going to see and report that to the producer, who would call VFX and get an estimate on cost, and we'd adjust the shot accordingly. The downside of the "flat people" was that they were just that, and if you were shooting at an angle to the stands the illusion would be broken (I can recall one particular shot in "Mr 3000" where this is really obvious if you know where to look). Around that time the cutouts were being replaced by blow up figures for this reason, but not long after that it it became cost-effective to do crowd replacement via VFX.
Besides the cardboard cutouts, yesterday they added fake crowds doing a wave in the outfield. The shot was a pan of the crowd as they did the wave. It wasn't clear to me that this was a pre-made comp or if they laid the crowd in live. Clearly fake. The animation was jerky. But it was kind of fun anyway.
G
Guest
Guest
Normally when I hear people talking about fan noise, it is sound giving the evil eye about some camera that won't stop overheating.
JAMedia
Well-known member
JAMedia
Well-known member
Satellite up-link? I was offered HD at £30 an hour last year.
I'm watching the Los Angeles - Oakland game. The crowd sound is poor. If the MLB is providing the effects as reported and it is the same library for all games, then the broadcast mixer is doing something bad to it. It has the high end chopped off. It sounds like reverb was added and almost as if a bit of flanger was added. It's off-putting compared to yesterday.
puredrifting
Major Contributor
Not in the area where our studio is. Generally, for live streaming, wireless is close to useless, the variances in throughput are all over the map constantly.
Using my example at home, my wired router is downstairs, possily 25-30' from my upstairs office computer. When I plug in my laptop downstairs via ethernet
into the router, get a rock solid 130-150mps up and down. Upstairs, with full signal 4G from the Apple AirPort, I get anywhere from 20-50mbps so I am losing 2/3
of my potential speed and it varies wildly, all of the time. At times it ducks down as low as 5mbps with the wireless.
I am in the midst of doing a very PITA Ethernet cable run to get CAT 5E upstairs because wireless is a joke. We experience the same out on location, we have a $4k Peplink
bonded wireless router with service through four different ISPs. It's always our backup when we are live streaming on location in case the clients internal network has issues.
I don't know enough about 5G to know if it mitigates all of these issues, but because it's wireless, count me as extremely skeptical.
5G is being touted as a whole new ball game when it comes to goodput. Carriers are more interested in it as a wired internet replacement than they are a mobile phone technology, although of course, it will be used for both. Supposedly good for 1Gps sustained rates and a 1ms delay. That would make its latency lower than any land line technology. Of course, all wireless technologies are subject to dropouts, especially in bad weather. So that won't go away. I've been looking forward to it for quite some time, wondering, with that latency and speed, how it will be used.
Bassman2003
Veteran
The upcoming Tesla Starlink might be a good mobile streaming platform depending on its particulars. Something that is not built around cell use has a better shot imho.