How do the cameras in race cars seem to ALWAYS be pointing at the right thing at the right time?

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Does every car camera have it’s own operator?

Whenever there is a crash in nascar or similar the camera ALWAYS seems to be pointing in the right direction, even if the crash only takes half a second, far too short of a time for somebody to switch to the camera controls, then move it around to get the crash in shot?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

They have wide angle cameras (360 degrees in some cases), the production team can “zoom” or crop the wide image from the camera into a narrower view emulating a regular lens.

The production process for live races is pretty impressive. There are multiple editing teams who are in charge of different cameras. One editing team may be dedicated to the on-car cameras, another does the track side cameras, another does the “floating” eye in the sky cameras, and another does the correspondent/interview camera feeds. All of these edited feeds go to a master editor, who switches between them to create the mix of different views that goes out on TV. The master editor relies on the sub-teams to capture whatever is interesting or important from their cameras and put it onto their feed. If there is a crash, the master editor can switch to the on-car sub-feed confident that team has the most interesting view of the crash pulled up.

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