More Coverage , Less Quality?

I have all the BTCC Review Videos from the 90's and most of those up until the mid 00's, however none post 2007....

Since 2007 ITV has upped its airtime for the BTCC and now the series has un-deniably the most comprahensive coverage in terms of viewing minutes ever known.

So why then am i watching the coverage of today's races at Knockhill and feeling the exact same dissapointment and frustration that i seem to have experienced with nearly every televised round of the series that i have watched over the past couple of years?

A bland stream of continous footage of the same groups of cars with no variation on in-car on board footage. Very few 'on-board' replay and analysis of incidents and the usual almost 40/60 percentage share of onboard/static trackside camera usage of the 90's.

The grid is large, the drivers are good and the racing generally is close. The coverage bland and boring. Bring back "in car" on board cameras, they all have them for use by TOCA with driver investigations and clearly they can be used 'LIVE' as they already are when on the bumpers or facing the drivers.

ITV's camera operators missed numerous big incidents today aswell as at other events and at no times were on-board cameras facilitated to make up for this on replays.

It's like losing a charasmatic good looking girlfriend for a dumb but good looking plank ...

Rant over. Discuss...

I have to say I get a tad fed up of just showing the cars too close. I lose the 'feel' for the race when it is lap after lap of the same shot. You need to pull back and watch a battle from a distance more often and then you won't miss so much of the action.

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Originally Posted by speedy king

I have all the BTCC Review Videos from the 90's and most of those up until the mid 00's, however none post 2007....

So why then am i watching the coverage of today's races at Knockhill and feeling the exact same dissapointment and frustration that i seem to have experienced with nearly every televised round of the series that i have watched over the past couple of years?

A bland stream of continous footage of the same groups of cars with no variation on in-car on board footage. Very few 'on-board' replay and analysis of incidents and the usual almost 40/60 percentage share of onboard/static trackside camera usage of the 90's.

The grid is large, the drivers are good and the racing generally is close. The coverage bland and boring. Bring back "in car" on board cameras, they all have them for use by TOCA with driver investigations and clearly they can be used 'LIVE' as they already are when on the bumpers or facing the drivers.

ITV's camera operators missed numerous big incidents today aswell as at other events and at no times were on-board cameras facilitated to make up for this on replays.

It's like losing a charasmatic good looking girlfriend for a dumb but good looking plank ...

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In the 90s nothing was live. The races were shown a week, or sometime two weeks later, so the TV producers had days to look through all of the footage, find the best angle of each incident and include it in the final edit.

Onboards were recorded on tape in the cars, so the limitation on the number of onboards available was the number of cameras they had. In a live environment onboards are sent via radio links, so they are limited by the number of available frequencies and bandwidth.

Often they stretched time - so that if two things happened on different parts of the track at the same time, they would show them one after the other, pretending that each was being shown "as live".

Finally, because everything was done after the event, they know what is going to happen in advance, so they know when it is safe to put in a replay without missing something else.

I don't think most people would want to go back to the dark ages of not being able to watch live.

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Originally Posted by tintin

In the 90s nothing was live.

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I'm sorry, but that's simply not true. There was live coverage of three meetings in each of 1997, '98 and '99 — always with on-board footage.

I totally agree with the comment on the zoomed in shots, naturally these exclude the amount the camera can pick up when it's focusing so close on 1 or 2 cars..

I wouldn't be all that bothered to lose 'live' for some realy quality coverage....A modern review DVD could easily bore me unlike the well put together footage of before