I don't have any super helpful suggestions but I do want to say how cool the replays and the player cams were. It really made the cast feel professional and showed the personal/LAN aspect of the event, as opposed to just strictly gameplay. Seeing peoples' reactions to big plays and stuff really adds to the excitement

i remember the initial start of i52 being really shaky, i think that all of those issues should be sorted/tested before any stream goes live

i don't know if gxl has the spare bandwidth to stream out or if it's going to be a local recording, but i just figured that should be brought up since i remember the audio/technical issues took about 15-45 minutes to sort out

Crowd cam was poor quality.

Some overlays fading in/out (through nodecg control) and some flicking on/off (through OBS) looked inconsistent.

Roaming camera was shown several times while moving (need radios).

Tournament brackets on stream would have been cool.

Intermission music cut abruptly rather than fading.

No polls shown IIRC.

Lighting and background for the casters could have been better.

Casters weren't prepared for replays.

Capture card colours looked weird.

Split screen would be nice, I would suggest showing both teams' medics before pushes.

To expand on this, it seemed like a lot of people were complaining about the stream being cluttered by having the player/caster cameras. Depending on how you ultimately resolve that, you could probably have the player cameras on stream when the log parser detects airshots/streaks/etc?

I don't know if many people share my view, but I feel like only having the player camera up in those scenarios and saving the caster camera for pre/post games (or for special occasions like pauses/etc) could be a good idea if screen clutter is still an issue

or both demos during rollouts :3

+1 on the above.

For whatever it's worth, I would also like to say that the camera work was by far the best part about the stream for me. I had never seen a TF2 cast that was anywhere close to being as action packed as the i52 casts were. Whatever you do at GXL, keep the 20 second log hack working, it was brilliant and I couldn't stop watching the games.

Mostly from a caster's point of view:

Replays need to have a longer transition between them allowing casters to speak about what just happened. Out of nowhere, about 8 replays were fired off in quick succession. A fade out followed by 2 - 6 seconds of blackness would be ideal. It would be even better if casters also got a pre warning about what replay was about to be shown (see below).

Ideally replays would have a text label on them. There's several moments of a TF2 game that look very similar, but even a heads up like, 'Clockwork's double'... 'War's Kritz Sticky' can really help both the viewers and commentators.

Stick the crowd cam ontop of a standard desk fan that rotates. That way when you switch to the crowd, it pans left and right which looks quite sexy! It also keeps your audience cool 8).

Add a count down timer. I know TF2 at these events can be hard to schedule, but even adding a 1 minute - 5 minute count down timer before going live really helps the audience know what is happening. It means casters can simply say, "We will take a quick 2 minute break before this game goes live!"... production then starts a 2 minute countdown timer. Bah... you know what I mean.. just too lazy to properly explain it right now. Even if you get the timing off and you have another 10 minutes to wait, you can get on the camera, have a quick two minute chat to the viewers to remind them what is happening and then pop up another timer.

In game camera man should use some third person. TF2 has appeal for not just the aim of a player, but team's positioning and third person can show this incredibly well.

Give commentators a way to see twitch chat. It provides a higher level of interaction with the online audience (I just grabbed my phone and went on there, but it would be nice to have a little ipad or something with the stream open). That way commentators can ask for viewer's opinions on who will win etc...

That's all I can really think of right now. Production was top notch at i52. The people who attend these events are only getting more and more experienced and with new talent arriving to help out at every event, I'm always excited to see how the bar is going to be raised again!

during casts the chat can be incredibly distracting and even demoralizing for some casters and i usually highly advise them to avoid reading it while casting. pregame and postgame it's fine but during games is a no-no.

Something small that's been used for ESEA lans that we missed is a 'Local time: xx:xx'/'Next game ETA: xx:xx' on the overlay. There were some people in chat turning up late to matches because they thought times were EU, not UK.

Edit: also for anyone wondering, the overlay will be different. This one was a one-off recreation of the VTV i49 overlay, and most likely won't be used again.

Id like to see more interaction with the crowd. For example short interviews with viewers and their experience of the game after it ended. Also it wouldve been nice to show the whole event hall a few times or a portable live cam (+cameraman) that is able to catch more emotions and the social side of TF2. (obviously with an implemented delay synced to the stream ones)

use the player backgrounds you did for some of the esea games, the intros with their faces and then the roaming camera of them would be pretty cool

maybe try to recreate a hud for big events

replays were awesome so big ups for that, but what i think would be really cool is if you could recap the game like a minute or two after showing each last cap, some big plays, maybe a close mid in all under 5 minutes

regardless

excited for gxl and big ups for producing comp tf2

Anything you can do to reduce backround noise in the casters mics is great.

The 20 second caster/cameraman cheat log is great and if it were possible to line up big plays/airshots with a players/teams cam to show the real life reaction in time with the play on screen it would be awesome.

Split screen demo rollouts are awesome.

Most importantly, keep being the incredible group of people that you are. Seriously, the effort you guys put into i52 was amazing.

Get proper audio on all the cameras, especially the crowd cam. I thought the setup you had there deserved a dedicated audio person. Also maybe have some sort of presenter with a microphone being followed by a camera walking around the venue, talking about stuff and doing quick interviews with players. Would keep things more interesting between games / maps than the static cameras.

If possible, I'd like to see even more of the player cams. Preferably so that they are on screen more often than not. As already said in this thread, seeing the players react live to the plays really adds to the experience.

I thought the player cams were cool, but it was weird when the epsilon cam was only WAR. I realize it was probably a space issue, but still something to work on.

Matter of angles and people available to man the camera's. Knoxxx was obscured by a huge PC case for example for our camera angle.

We didn't have a dedicated audio person, nor the gear the support such a person, unfortunately. We're just some guys bringing a ton of consumer equipment to try and mimic a professional broadcast. We don't have a mile of SDI cables and gear.

No.

We considered doing a roaming camera with a laptop, USB3 capture 'card' and SLR with proper HDMI out. Had to scrap it due to lack of reliable WiFi, but it's definitely something that can be done.

Couple thoughts:

When jumping into a team's mumble, try to stick to that team's POV. It's a lil brain frazzling to be watching one team's roamer while listening to the other team talking bout sending in a bomb. Sometimes this happened, sometimes it didn't. I'm not sure if player binds were working, which would certainly have hampered pulling that off.

Player health bars - I really prefer the setting where health bars only show up upon players taking damage. It's annoying to see during the roll-out, but I think that's a whole lot less annoying then just having health bars floating above everyone when nothing is happening. If there isn't any damage happening, you can just look at the side bar to see people's health.

Player outlines - can these be brightened up a bit? I watched a good chunk of i52 on my phone and at the low-res picking up the outlines was kinda tough.

So much awesomeness at the i52 cast though, definitely set a new standard. Great job everyone.

I definitely love watching TF2 in third person. Sadly, transitioning good shots in real time is pretty difficult and it's generally better to just stay in first person. I like a third person shot when things are getting crazy and the pov player dies, but I know I'm probably a minority in that regard :/

I can't think of any criticisms at the moment, so here are a few things that I really enjoyed that I hope you keep doing:

-Live stats
-Replays
-Health bars

i think thirdperson and freecam are useful when teams are stalemating to see rotations and transitions from the teams, but the majority of the matches at i52 had so little stalemating and so much player skill (airshots, crazy scout plays, snipers, etc) that moving away from first person would be a disservice to the viewer.

Also, I quite dislike the cheat cam sometimes. It makes fights predictable to watch as the person you are spectating usually is the victor in a 1v1.

Sometimes it's nice to see the POV of the guy who was air shotted... rather than the one firing.

I don't see why you think third person camera shots do anything but enhance a cast?
TF2 has a unique style of play that partially resembles MMO / Moba games. This aspect of the game is better viewed in third person. You can see all the players better, you can see all their positioning better and you can follow the entire fight a lot better. The only thing you miss out on is seeing how an individual aims. Even then, with most weapons being projectiles anyway, you still see the incredible skill involved in some shots.

You can track that initial crit sticky across the map better in third person.
Sometimes kills can't be seen in first person as the player moved out of view or spam rockets can't see the target.

Sure, third person cameras need to be controlled well or they can look tacky. There needs to be a real effort in making them smooth. But a static third person view that can see both teams at a choke point that slowly pans around and then switches to first person when a push is made does nothing but make the game look better.

Thanks for posting the topic dash, been really busy with work, and thanks for all the positivity from everyone :)

Third person is nice in theory but in practice it never really works out because you can't make the movement smooth enough to not look like aids.
As for being on the wrong team during team comms, I tried to be on the right team as much as possible but I'm not going to stick with the right team if I can show off a sick airshot or a 3k or whatever.
Replays needed some work, we tried to look into better delays between them and how to let casters know what was going on but we were way too busy to do anything about it live at LAN.
Player outline colours were matched to the HUD colours, anything else would have looked out of place.

Meant to ask about these:

Total team health bars between teams, y/n: http://i.imgur.com/vpDPBIl.png

When a medic dies, show 0% charge and last used gun, or remove all text and just show background (or remove background too / make a cvar / whatever)

Total team health bars clutter the screen are really don't add much to the cast.

The medic thing should be it says 0 and the medigun/kritzkreig name doesn't show (basically a mix of both of the options) and then it would look perfect. :)

I personally like watching certain things in third person. It would be nice to have maybe some stationary camera points set up where you hit a button and it goes to the nearest stationary point, somewhat like what the folks over at RoomOnFire have. (2:49)

Definitely add an overlay with the tourny bracket and a timer until the next match in-between games

I think the team health bar is in a place where it doesn't add much clutter and i kind of like glancing at it occasionally.

and like quicquam said, i think a mixture of having 0% and no medigun name is best.

about replays: i think some replays should be played more than once, sometimes huge airshots that last only 3, 4 seconds doesnt even let the caster comment on what happened. i know there's no different angle like in football, basketball or any other sport since the replays are from the cameraman POV, so it would be cool to watch a replay again (for at least short replays)

I really dont like this, it clutters the screen a lot and looks way out of place and just not aesthetic. There was one time where both streams tftv1 and tftv2 were casting the same stream and tftv2 didnt have the total health bars neither the health bars on the players, just the outlines and it looked so much cleaner and pleasant to the eye, I ended up just sticking with the second stream because of that, to be honest I was never a fan of the player health bars to start with, I think they are a great resource for demo reviewing and general study of the game but in live streams they just add an unnecessary clutter to the screen when you already have a HUD that displays loud and clear the hp and status of all the players.

The first is ok imo