I’ve noticed that sports channels are able to upload a highlight reel for YouTube so fast. Doesn’t it normally take hours to edit a video?
In: Technology
If you were to take a game broadcast *after* it aired, go through it and try to pick out all the moments that are highlight-worthy and put them in a package – yes, it would take you quite a long time.
However, these packages are being created as the game airs. During a broadcast, plenty of moments are shown in replays and if they’re considered good enough, the producer will have them kept aside for use later too.
After that, it’s a simple case of deciding which of the moments kept at the time are definitely worth showing and which aren’t, and throwing some ready-produced graphics at the beginning, end and maybe some wipes to transition at most.
Networks have gotten *very very good* at streamlining all of this process.
Most highlights are nothing fancy – just live feed cut together, no extra camera footage, no sound or video effects.
You can pretty much do this as the game goes on, lagging behind like 5 minutes or so, which means you can have the highlight video ready for posting 10 or so minutes after the game.
There are people making it as the game is going on. And you’ve perhaps noticed they aren’t the most elegantly edited productions and are often missing plays that you’d expect.
Well, I don’t personally know how it works exactly, I can easily imagine a software system that allows a couple of editors to watch and flag sequences of the game (start and end timestamps). That system would put each sequence into a large manifest, sorted by order, and then the software package could stitch it all up automatically and create an upload at the end of the game.
The interesting part for me is that the highlight reel also changes dramatically based on who won.
For example, an NBA game that’s 100-100 with 2 minutes to go is a close game, could go either way.
Then one team ends up winning 106-104.
That highlight reel is going to show different highlights for the whole game, based on those last few points. The winning team is going to get more positive highlights, and the losing team will get a few more lowlights. “The losers couldn’t keep up with the 3 point barrage of the winners” or whatever. Despite the fact that with a different last 5 seconds of the game, the entire highlight package might have told a different story.
Also, if you didn’t watch the whole thing, lot of websites will have a text live feed with the highlights and playtime, you could just easily find the best moments in the video with this.
The way it works at least at places like ESPN and FOX is that each game is assigned a production assistant (PA) an entry level position whose job is to watch the game and basically log every play and write down everything that happens. Each play is logged as a clip in their video system (typically made by Quantel) that can be viewed simultaneously by an editor. Overseeing the PA is a person known as a Highlights Supervisor or HighSup for short. The HighSup is monitoring usually several games at once and relies on the PA logging an individual game to basically put together a rough outline of the important moments in a game and create a basic narrative. Narratives are subjective but let’s say there’s a baseball game that was low scoring. Then the narrative might be that a pitcher had a great day with strikeouts. And the highlight might consist of a bunch of strikeouts. The PA has to pitch to the HighSup what tells the story of the game (though they are often overruled).
The length of the highlights are determined by the show’s producer. On a show like Sportscenter the producer will meet with the HighSups at the beginning of the day and try to determine what the biggest games are and the producer will give those priority in the show rundown. But being sports anything can happen so the rundown is changing all the time. So it’s not uncommon for there to be three or four highlights for the same game of different lengths.
Full highlights can typically be as long as two minutes for something like a big NFL game, but anything less is typically determined in “plays”. So for example they have one-play highlights, which you might see during a game break, two play highlights, which you might see during a halftime show or for a game that was of lower importance and then from there you can add as many plays as tells the story of the game. A Super Bowl highlight might be 10 minutes. But long highlights are rare as the leagues (NFL, NCAA, NBA, etc) as well as other broadcasters often have limits to how much of their footage you can show. For example FOX might only be able to show 15 minutes of NFL highlights in their nightly show contractually so the producer has to do the dance of figuring out what games get the most time and what games either don’t get highlights or get one or two plays.
Each highlight is broken down into plays and each play is broken down into three parts. Situation>Action>Result. And this is how the shot sheet that the talent reads (written by the PA who watched the game and edited by the HighSup). “First Quarter, Patriots up by a touchdown, Brady connects to Wes Welker for a 70 yard touchdown, Patriots up 14 early.” So video wise the editor working with the high sup would find an establishing shot (situation), then show the play (action), then usually some sort of reaction shot to cap things off (result). Sometimes if it’s extraordinary you do a replay from a different angle before the reaction shot. And this is the basic shell of a highlight.
Every play, every reaction, every weird crowd shot, etc is logged by the PA, the HighSup makes sense of it and writes the copy for the talent, the editor then puts video to it and publishes that clip to the control room video servers so it can be played back on air. Nowadays a one play highlight could probably be turned around in less than a minute. In some cases I’ve seen where a producer wanted something so fast the highlight producer didn’t have time to write copy for the talent and they had to just explain what was happening to the talent while they were on the air. There are also cases where a highlight will be basically done but then something crazy happens at the end of a game and they just publish the last play and let the control room tack it onto the end of the original highlight live on the air in what’s known as a crossroll but this is usually for situations where things have to happen on the fly. But in most cases, for something like the late Sportscenter you have all day to put things together especially on the west coast where games end early. Something like a college football Saturday could be really hectic though with multiple studio shows on multiple networks.
It’s a bit more tedious on the east coast because games can run well after midnight and if something crazy happens in one of those late games like a walk off home run or a late NBA game having a player go off and score 50 that could blow up an entire show and you kind of have to redo everything because all the assumptions the producer made earlier in the day about what highlights should lead the show and be given more time might go out the window.
ESPN has a huge highlights department as does FOX and NBC with tons of PAs logging basically any game that’s on TV even if it never becomes a highlight and an army of HighSups wrangling all that and keeping the show producers honest about what games are worth showing.
I actually work for a company that specializes in this field! Basically there’s a lot of monitoring going on during the game. Have you ever seen a BTS photo from a newsroom where the control room is just tons of monitors and buttons? Pretty much any high end stadium will have a room like that for capturing all the audio and video for the game. There will be a main director calling out which cameras to switch to and what plays to clip for highlights. As tech advances in broadcast there’s also ways to automatically track players to easily get stats and follow big plays. For example in the NBA players wear tags that collect all sorts of data and allow for cameras to track players.
Also, away teams will often have big production trucks that have all the equipment necessary to do their own editing using the feed from the stadium. That way the away team can make highlight packages with stories focused on their players.
Same tech is used for instant replays and video assisted referee.
All of the cameras are digital these days so all of the shots are stored digitally. Then there is an editing crew that can pull the footage and edit it on the fly. And video editing software has gotten pretty involved these days.
They don’t get to watch the game, they are working.
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