Quote:
Originally Posted by 46zilzal
YEARLY, the WORST presentation of a horse race resides with NBC Sports. They obviously do not have a racing fan anywhere in the directorial chairs or they would know that cutting the race up in 40+ camera angles from start to finish, leaves the TV viewer completely lost as to the race evolution because you never have a consistent frame of reference for more than a few seconds before the "artsy craftsy" folks change it yet again.
I have written them many ay year to no avail stating :"JUST show us the race like the track does, with upper pan and lower pan on a split screen." CLUELESS
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Every national broadcast television network that has ever carried horse racing has done this. Andy Beyer had to stay home from the Breeders' Cup one year and wrote a very entertaining column about it.
The basic problems are twofold:
1. The people who produce and direct horse racing coverage for broadcast networks are not specialists- they also produce and direct the other sports broadcasts. And in those sports, the style that has developed is a mixture of wide shots that show the action and close-ups of the participants. So, for instance, on baseball, Fox will show the pitch, and there will be a swing or a taken pitch, and then an immediate cut to the batter, then the pitcher, then the bench, then back to the pitcher, etc. We often don't notice all these cuts, they happen so quickly.
Or think of a NASCAR race, where they shift from a view of the entire field to a view from a stationary camera of the cars zooming past, to a shot of just the leaders.
But when they cover horse racing (or another sport that requires the sustained focus of a single camera angle), they often don't know how to do it, because they just apply the same techniques they use in other sports.
2. Ego. The last thing you want to do is tell a director at NBC, who makes $300,000+ a year and has won sports Emmys and other stuff, that the robot or lowly racetrack employee who produces the in-house feed has it correct and all you have to do is take that feed. That NBC director wants to put his stamp on it, and isn't going to listen to anyone who tells him not to. He wants something artistic.
A good example of an artistic "ego" shot we get almost every year is the shot from low on the outside rail at about the 7 furlong pole at Churchill Downs on Derby day, specifically produced so you have that artistic shot of the horses running beneath the Twin Spires. Almost every year, horses get in trouble on the first turn of the Derby with the 20 horse field, and almost every year, broadcast television viewers never see it.
