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
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.
Latest Answers