obviously dont wanna speak for anyone but i wouldnt be surprised to hear that a lot of people just arent really interested in doing stuff like that, and i couldnt blame them. everyone whos doing this is doing it for fun out of their own free time and just might not be really interested in branching out to do education videos, especially if it involves learning new skills like editing (also worth noting that a lot/some of the community often gives producers a hard time so i wouldnt be surprised if that didnt help producers to have passion to do this stuff).

since you clearly seem keen to do stuff like this though rahmed, i'd suggest reaching out to relevant people like the ones you mentioned and seeing if they'd be interested in lending their knowledge/voices if you were able to handle the technical/organisational side of making such videos.

if ur the one interested in getting more people into it then you should be the one to do it.

kinda stupid to say we shouldnt rely on arch beater and wiet for everything and then make a post saying arch beater and wiet should do it for you

as long as u have a decent pc and internet u can definitely learn how to produce, just have to reach out to the right people and there's loads of documents and stuff setting it up (i produced a few invite matches way back in like 2017 and it was fun)

that said having someone actually knowledgeable about competitive is nice so they know when to go on the people about to sack and stuff like that, but anyone really can do it and do an okay job

I definitely think this idea is right, like the issue is not lack of talent or willingness. I think the community needs to do cool shit that is worth having an editor or artist for.

For example, we are having the billdozer cup, but besides it just being new and having a good prizepool, this is just another 6s tournament. Nothing really interesting, there is always tons of 6s being played by all the same teams.

I think if we want to incentivize the creation of interesting content, we also have to be responsible for what is actually being played. Maybe we actually do a draft tournament or a bball tournament or something that mixes up the traditional format.

Let me know what y'all think

DavidTheWin did some ingame observer practice streams ahead of i58 i think. (It was the i series lan that he was moved to head producer because Dashner could not enter UK). I remember watching parts of it and it was very interesting. Don't know if there are any vods.

I got blocked by beater cause he thought I was a scammer.

\actually dont agree with this its really noticeable when tftv streams are being run by someone not playing comp bcuz they just hotswitch to everyone who's about to get a kill based on the cheat feed. good producers actually keep the story of what's going on intact by knowing when to look at each combo or flank and which specific players are most likely to be doing stuff at any given moment.

maybe it's just bias from having done it but i think camera work alone is as hard as casting. add in everything else the single producer does for a tftv stream and its a ton of work that also requires a lot of background knowledge. i dunno what the solution to this would be tho

They have way more experience than me, and can relay their experience better, which is why I suggested them - I'm still learning things from them too

Dude casting is really easy if you've ever played 6v6. Having tried to cast and do camerawork at the same time, for my own stream, the camera work is so much harder than just talking about the game.

I actually have a script written for this, I just havent gotten around to making the videos. I did heaps of streams for cappingtv back in ozf s29/s30 a bunch of fbtf, even some rgl. getting everything set up is easy, its knowing what to look at/whos camera to be on thats challenging. Even moreso for HL.

Hmu on here or discord Rah and I’m happy to share my philosophy on spectating and producing

Every time I think "maybe i'll cast this game alone on my twitch" or "maybe I'll do my own camerawork for something" I immediately nope out because it's awful.

I should clarify, doing the camerawork alone isn't awful, but it takes a lot more brainpower and a lot of focus. Now layering casting overtop? My casting is always awful when doing both because it's such a burden. Love your producers, cherish producers because it means I can float in 3rd person.

One thing I think that makes people hesitant to try actually casting or producing, is there's an expected level of quality for RGL and TFTV streams. Chat can be ruthless if a caster says something that is objectively wrong, and how many times have we seen complaints about watching powerpoint instead of a cast? That's not a bad thing, as it holds the top level orgs accountable, but I could definitely see that backlash also serving as a detractor from people who want to try.

What I think should happen, is either another TFTV channel like TFTVDevelopmental or even a new organization that is focused on growing talent. Yeah the broadcast quality may suck, yeah the cameraman may miss everything, yeah the casters may be bad, but they're trying. Back when I first got into casting, I started with early days EVLTV, and that was their focus at the time. They didn't care what experience you had, they'd take anybody who wanted to try. Twitch chat tended to be supportive too because they knew EVL=Not great quality, but it was at least casting the IM game they wanted to watch. Ultimately the people who tried got better, and guys like Me, Flatline, Row and a couple others ended up doing stuff for TFTV or doing LANs.

I'm sorry! It's very hard to keep track of people when you get a bunch of new friend requests every day.

If people are interested I've been thinking about doing a stream where I review different observers and talk about what they're doing right and wrong in my opinion. Sort of like a demo review for observers.

Any idea for who I should look at?

Think it would be cool to look at ingame observers from different eras. Lange from what i remember did an amazing job on the i49 granary match where TCM/Broder did the comeback against the australians.

Not sure if analyzing LAN casts or online with cheat sheet is best.

The biggest demand is a one press button and ur entire launch options and cfg gets swapped to production config and then u press it again and it switches it back to ur Gaming config

Something like this:

https://i.imgur.com/Kx9UsM1.png

I could be incorrect but I think Lawena just has this capability. Its not exactly what the tool is for, but I think it may get the job done.

I think switching configs is relatively easy compared to everything else that goes into production. I just have different configs zipped in my custom folder and I'll simply unpack whatever cfg I need and delete the other. unless your launch options are extremely weird you won't have to alter more than a few commands in there

https://i.imgur.com/XlMj2Ja.png

the best way ive found to swap configs is create two custom folders (custom_cast and custom_config) and use a symbolic link (windows documentation on symlinks), on linux you can do similar but this is windows specific (maybe someone who cares more can make a gui for it like hamaham posted just so people don't have to write scary code themselves, would have to prompt for the two tf folders and ask launch options)

** RENAME CUSTOM BEFORE RUNNING THESE or else your entire custom folder will be deleted, otherwise u can add a test if the custom folder is a symlink following this if you really want to be safe

cast_on.bat

rmdir "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\custom"
mklink /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\custom" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\custom_cast"

cast_off.bat

rmdir "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\custom"
mklink /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\custom" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\custom_config"

i also created two shortcuts to hl2.exe in the same directory as these .bat files which I could double click to launch tf2 with my regular launch options or my cast launch options (u can follow this guide) in order to avoid typing -insecure and changing dxlevel every time

if you wanna go crazy you can also do a symlink for your %APPDATA%\roaming\obs-studio folder so that you can have an entirely different OBS setup (stream keys, plugins, everything) for casting and for regular streaming, may be easier to just use the profiles thing in OBS but if you have all these batch files in one folder you can just double click all the casting related ones and it's super easy, then double click the ones to swap back once you're done

the amount of times i accidentally overwrote my binds because i forgot to move everything in my cfg folder to a disabled folder is too many times to count

Is this not what 4Plug is for?

But getting back on to the main point, I've done production for TFTV from 2018-2020, and then ran my own mini production org for about a year during and afterwards, where I also branched into other games and tried to cast those as well. There are so many hurdles for people to get into observing that a lot of potential observers and producers just wouldn't be interested. The amount of energy it takes to be able to create a storyline out of DM fights, while paying attention to casters so you can help the viewer follow their action while also catching stuff the casters miss is much more than it feels like at any given time. Chat is heartless and will call you out for any mistake you make, which will be plenty as you're learning how to do it, let alone all the trolls. Players you're having to work with to get server info choose to make your life as difficult as possible, or completely disregard you because they have no respect for what you're trying to do. You're likely going to be both producing and observing simultaneously, which is navigating this jumbled mess where any mistake is also once more called out by chat, while you're also primarily observing.

https://i.imgur.com/XpISjnX.png

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed my time observing. I will say that I was an edge case where I both couldn't/didn't want to play on teams during those times, because anybody on a team would rather scrim and play their matches instead of running a stream, and I actually enjoyed putting on a show that people came to watch and enjoy. But I can't imagine many people being in my shoes. Louster200 enjoyed the actual act of production, but every little thing that came with it destroyed his mentality and now he doesn't even want to be near team fortress again after running the NA TFTV streams for about 2 years.
Let me know if people are interested in a production setup tutorial. I have experience with both setting up my own streams as well as what TFTV looks for in streamers, so there's a niche amount of experience that I wouldn't mind taking the time to put across to people. At the same time, don't catch me looking surprised when not many people are interested.

Going to review some observers now: https://www.twitch.tv/beaterdk

Here you go:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1074834985

I actually use the bearodactyl suggested setup, but with a single custom folder and symlink the casting huds from /tf/huds to /tf/custom/a_casting_hud, which contains the configs for the cast instead of having to rename/replace custom folder, but that is only useful if you don't play TF2 at and don't have wildly different playing/observing configs.

Actually using the existing launch-options to switch profile & scene collection for OBS in a shortcut (or .bat file) make a lot more sense than also starting to symlink there or create custom portable folders for each org/stream.

"%programfiles%/obs-studio\bin\64bit\obs64.exe" --startreplaybuffer --studio-mode --profile TFTV1 --collection TFTV1 --scene Music

https://i.imgur.com/snDMyXa.png

-----
And yes, I can confirm the hardest part about producing TF2 streams is team/player cooperation and the actual observing. I've been super spoiled with the ice hockey esports production I've been able to do the past months where the matches won't start until they have green light from production to start the search/match.

I wanna help tf.tv cast, would be fun!

I would be interested in casting and or doing production for games, but how do I get into it?
And my pc is shit so video quality would be a powerpoint presentation.

If you're interested in casting contact DuMmTm and let him know.

If you have a shit computer and want to do production you're out of luck. I've already filled that niche.

Not sure what everybody elses experience has been like but usually the producer will ask me for the stv and then that's the end of the conversation. It usually takes the players to ask production/check the stream to see if its ok to start not the other way around - would be great if production informing could be the norm, especially for the big games.

I almost never have issues when dealing with players. As long as they get me the stv info in time I'm happy. People even recently started asking whether they could start or not, which never used to be a thing, and I honestly don't really care as long as they get us the info in a timely manner (which they always do). So yeah, I don't share Wiethoofd's opinion or experience on player cooperation. Maybe 6v6 is just better than highlander or something.

i volunteer myself for casting

I enjoy producing/observing a lot but at this point in my life it's simply hard to justify sinking that 6-8 hours a week during the season into something that doesn't pay me, can often be stressful, and is pretty thankless work overall.

It doesn't help that a small number of high level NA players treat production (at least for TFTV) with anywhere between indifference and outright hostility (ignoring requests for stv info, changing servers without telling production, not providing rcon info for cheatfeed, being generally unresponsive/hard to reach, etc.). Covering lower level NA stuff or the few Prem casts I've done in recent memory I've had almost exclusively positive experiences with players, but I can't say the same for my experience doing NA invite sadly.

I still remember a couple seasons ago when aim straight up restreamed a TFTV cast of the Amateur Grand Finals match as it was happening, with zero effort to differentiate from the TFTV stream, which was really upsetting and disappointing to me. It's clear that some NA players just don't respect production at all and that's one of the biggest turn-offs for me personally, and makes me think twice whenever I consider producing more again.