Stick with 1st person shots.

when someone gets an airshot shake your mouse as hard as possible to make the frag video editors job easier

Well, it seems like a lot of predicting how the play is going to go, I also would assume that prior knowledge of how certain players play would help a lot too. Oh and being in the same mumble channel and listening to who the casters say they are watching and then switching to said player will give the viewers a better experience as well.

Is it HL or sixes?

For sixes.. there's always "something" going on. There are phases. Like on a 5cp, a team will be building uber.. or they'll be pushing up, or they're holding.. when one of these things is going on, just sit and watch this. Don't be afraid to stick with one person/shot for a little while - switching cameras too much is usually bad. You want to pick up flank plays a bit and whatnot, but just don't switch a billion times.

And turn down your mouse sensitivity! Helps a lot for freecam on mids, make it smoother.

listen to the casters
if they're talking about the blue pocket we dont want to see the red scout pov
or if someone says "im going to watch _______ this mid" then put your camera on that person

Here's a list of advice I assembled when I first started. Combination of Sal, Duder, and eXtine's advice (with a little of my own!)

• If you are going to use third person a lot, picking a spot in the sky and look down without moving your mouse. Don't do a lot of extra work trying to follow the action around. For example on Gravelpit's B point, the main fighting is always going to happen behind the point, so placing the camera by the giant rock looking down towards the house is a good vantage point.

• In third person camerawork, keep the camera still. Find a perch and stick with it for at least 5 seconds,and if you need to move the mouse to change angle, do it in a focused, slow way like a real camera(think security cameras on top of a grocery store). A way of using third person camera is to start in firstperson, click through until you find someone in a big battle or want to point out something about the map,then double-tap space to go 3rd-person and zoom straight up with the "Move up" / "Swim up" command. Binding that to a key near the WASD keys is very useful. Swim down is also useful of course, but swimup is great to get a 3rd-person vantage above the battle. You can bind those movement keys on the keyboard menu.
•Make sure you have "Hud_reloadscheme" bound to a key so you can quickly reload the HUD when
players drop/rejoin. It should look like: bind p "hud_reloadscheme". That will set it to your P key.

• In "down time" when not much is happening, watch Spies or Snipers.

• Keep the camera on the action. When you see a fight, make sure it's visible.

• Don't be afraid of first person and don't be afraid to click a few times until you find an interesting class. Spy almost always good, especially the spy of the team with lower Uber percent (needs to make a big pick). Heavy, soldier, or demo cam is often good, especially again when there's an uber deficit because soldier and demo will be trying to jump the med a lot. Sniper too

This is from my guide to casting, which is here if you or your friends are interested.

//obsidiian's casting cfg

alias blu_medic "spec_player <player name here>"
alias blu_scout1 "spec_player <player name here>"
alias blu_scout2 "spec_player <player name here>"
alias blu_soldier1 "spec_player <player name here>"
alias blu_soldier2 "spec_player <player name here>"
alias blu_demo "spec_player <player name here>"

bind r blu_medic
bind f blu_scout1
bind v blu_scout2
bind t blu_soldier1
bind g blu_soldier2
bind b blu_demo

alias red_medic "spec_player <player name here>"
alias red_scout1 "spec_player <player name here>"
alias red_scout2 "spec_player <player name here>"
alias red_soldier1 "spec_player <player name here>"
alias red_soldier2 "spec_player <player name here>"
alias red_demo "spec_player <player name here>"

bind y red_medic
bind h red_scout1
bind n red_scout2
bind u red_soldier1
bind j red_soldier2
bind m red_demo

Put this in a file called casting.cfg or something and type exec casting in console when you want to cast a match. Replace <player name here> with each person's full name. Then, hit their respective keys to immediately switch the camera to that player. If you don't want to use up all those keys, add me and I can help make a script that uses less keys.

To jump directly to a specific person the command is

spec_player <player name>

There was a program that would read a STV demo file and made a set of binds to jump to each of those players, but I can't find it. If they were going to do live STV casting, they would have to make the binds manually.

Okay, I was thinking there would have to be some better way of doing it than manually typing in all the names every time.
That's cool that that exists though, someone should drop that link.

Dunno if it's what Rick means, but a bunch of streamers & casters use miek's spectate helper plugin

Bind some keys the way that post says, then in pre game go through each button and note who it goes to. I think it goes in order of who joins the server first?

You won't have to redo binds every game, but it won't work for players with " in their name, and if someone leaves the order will change (I think everyone after that player just gets moved up one key, and when they reconnect they're at the end, but I'm not sure)

Actually he might mean atmo's STV binds program. There's a thread here if you search for it

tf2 camerawork is an artform now. much harder to do camerawork for our game as compared to mobas. more camerawork tips please!

Biggest thing I found useful was to listen to your casters. People want to see what the casters are talking about.

If there is no clear hint of who to follow from the casters, think "who is likely to go huge very soon?". E.g. one team got forced, other team has full uber, first team's roamer is likely to do something to force the other team.

Keep an eye on the classes to make sure you catch offclasses.

Don't switch POVs too quickly. I'd make an exception for this if you accidentally switch to someone respawning which isn't that big of a mistake anyway. For example, if there's a x2 backcap, there are 2 or 3 likely classes it could be, chances are you could switch to a scout grabbing health way behind the action whilst the other is capping but whatever shit happens.

Sometimes switching to the medic's POV is better than trying to guess what's going to kill the medic.

Above all, concentrate on the game. Get into it as much as the players are getting into it. When I streamed, I had information 20 seconds ahead of what was happening, so if someone bombed the medic and got the uber drop, I'd know 20 seconds in advance and I'd be able to switch to the person. However, in some games I'd find myself not using it at all but still catching the action because I was so focused on the game.

Finally, remember that you can't catch every single bit of action. One particular moment I've experienced this was during this game (i think) when both roamers got huge plays at pretty much identical times. You're always going to miss something, don't let it get to you and carry on following the game.

A lot of it is just knowing the general flow of a game and predicting who is going to be the most interesting.

Thanks for the advice everyone. Just did a cast of my team's scrim, I'd love if you could watch the vod here (starts at around 7:00):
http://www.twitch.tv/sneaktf2/b/487727069
Sorry about the quality, I forgot to optimize my stream settings for my school internet, last time I streamed was when I was home where my upload is much better.

I tried using this, but it didn't seem to work for all players, only for those with 1 word in their name. Tried putting the full name in quotes too, didn't do anything.

Looks like the download link is down, anyone have a mirror for it?

Thanks, I'll definitely try to use that for lives games then.

I compiled that spec helper plugin for you.
miek's spectate helper plugin

Pretty much every streamer (me included) at teamfortresstv uses SpecHelper.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4vaii5m9xkf1sz/spec_helper.7z (I included my binds in the readme file.)

If you need any more help feel free to add me on Steam.

To anyone more experienced, is there any way to get around this one word name issue while using this method?

The way atmo's tool does it, which works fine with spaces or any weird characters is:

File: blu_scout.cfg

spec_player "<insert player name with spaces and weird characters here>"

Then to switch to the player:

bind p "exec blu_scout.cfg"

You could make these files manually or use the tool to create them for you.