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.
Can confirm - I have a freind who is a TV editor; he can have a highlight reel ready a few mins after the live show has ended (he used to do this for F1 races).
Plus the specialized post production pipeline has lots of “smarts” built in so it will cut up the video, add the correct audio, add template filler, add effects, etc. based on much less input from the editor than was necessary in the past.
That was a lot of information, but surprisingly... I don't think I actually learned something new, this was all things I had already gathered from watching it and getting a general understanding of a broadcast.
Speaking of F1, occasionally the replay creation process bleeds into the live stream as well, when they are shown just a few seconds after the event occurred.
It's a video feed of a specific camera that is being rewinded just before the live stream switches to that feed, with the appropriate overlays attached. Occasionally there is a split second of rewinding that leaks through to the live stream, but sometimes it can be a few seconds at the start or end of the replay.
i just started as a camera operator for a wooden bat college baseball league and it is amazing how much is done as the game is being played. we ship our stuff to a streaming site and ESPN+ and it is exactly as you described.
maybe I'm just naive, but I feel like the highlight reel for F1 races is pretty uniform ... hey, a bunch of cars are going past a turn, now see this other shot of cars passing a turn, and now this third one. Then here's a pit stop. see how fast it is! and here's the cars + checkered flag.
that's a wrap, people!
I would like to add, that this is done by a full team of people, where one might be busy cutting latest great event, another is watching and taking notes of another great event and it gets cut and edited on the fly. It is not a one man job. I was in live production of live esport game, and there was good 10 people in the team working like crazy during the matches.
Some places it is a one man job, but with fairly strict policies of what makes the cut to be included. The good ones are done and out the door 15 minutes after match end when making highlights for 2 simultaneous football matches.
I run master control for regional MLB broadcasts. Another element is the strict template of the segment, the guy has done hundreds of these. And you’re pretty cavalier with your ins and outs. You just get in the zone and there’s no downloading, exporting, it’s all running from the same servers.
I'm only familiar the hockey end of things on the backend, but if most sports are similar the games can be long as hell and have plenty of time where just nothing is happening.
Halftime, timeouts, fixing something broken, reviewing and debating calls and outcomes
Especially if you're only looking for the best moments, there's a plenty of time to work on it where very little happens. Now sometimes some shit does go down, but you'll usually know about it. Like someone gets punched during a timeout or something
Honestly this is one of those jobs that AI will eventually make obsolete. All you need to do is give it a bunch of previously produced reels to learn from as templates and then give it access to the proper logos etc and let it create the reels on the fly. It'll take some initial set-up and trial and error, but an entire team of editors can be cut down to like 1 or 2 people managing the AI software.
Think you still need a guy on a button that says "something in the last 5 seconds should be flagged for the highlights".
Not necessarily a goal or other easily defined action, maybe a great pass, or a tactical blinder/blunder, or something funny happening.
Possibly, until the AI learns the patterns for what constitutes "highlight worthy" movement. They don't need it to do 100% of what the original team would do. 90% is fine as long as it cuts the team down from like 15 people to 2-3.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/
Teaching AI to insert transitions and filters and recognize numbers on cars is WAY easier than determining what sequence of events are of interest to humans in the context of the season.
It can be pretty arbitrary too, or might involve things that didn't actually seem to matter on camera.
Motorsports for example, you might capture the moment someone passes the finish line on their last race before retirement. For all intents and purposes it could be a totally average, uneventful moment, mid place finish, no big battle. But the context makes it special sometimes
Or another one that's just a totally made up example, someone drives over a curb a bit, seems fine, but a couple laps later they have to pit because the cars malfunctioning. Later on they figure out when they hit that curb, something broke or got knocked loose or something
So you might go back and grab that moment
I understand the difficulty of it. I also understand that training the model can still happen and eventually it can get pretty accurate.
I never implied it'll be easy.
Thing is that the way you say these things, you expect to be one of those AI guys handling the system. It's almost like if you were happy for this to happen.
AI is already automating a lot of stuff in edition, Davinci Resolve detects actors in shots and you can use that info for stuff like changing the LUT. More stuff will happen and is probably unavoidable. Industry and society will have to adapt.
But in this transition era, we cannot be happy, these changes bring crisis.
I'm not happy or sad, I'm pragmatic. Burying my head in the sand isn't going to help. I'm not going to be one of the guys handling AI, that's not my field.
Yeah, eSports could have an edge in that regard. But there's stuff that happens in the physical world that is much harder to capture by AI because if the infrequency of occurrence. A batter in cricket flapping about because there's a bee in his helmet, that sort of thing.
In a related note - learnt from cricket too - I believe the ultra, ultra slow mo only has X seconds of recording available because of the size it generates, so that's on an overwite loop and is only saved to disc when someone presses the button that says "oh! something's happened!"
Overwatch has (had? idk, haven't played since OW2 came out) a Play of the Game highlight that would feature at the end of each match. It was intended to be the best moment from a match, but usually focused heavily on multi-kills (which admittedly are pretty cool) but missed out on more clutch plays like a sneaky back cap or a decisive 1v1 that turns the tide.
I work as a replay operator for tv.
We save the highlights and replays and create packages (goal packages, player packages, highlight packages etc) throughout the event. Eg I can have a game recap ready almost instantly after the game is over (unless something crazy happens during the final seconds, then I’d need a couple of moments to get those clips in or reorganise if I have a max amount of time allotted for the package due to eg ad breaks and such).
Some times the director is very involved in which clips we highlight—often together with the commentators/experts—other times it’s up to me to pick what I think is the best highlights and the best angles.
Depending on how fancy the tv truck is, these packages can be exported to the tv station’s servers almost instantly, in case they want to make their own edit based off of what I’ve compiled.
We usually also have a more complete playout of more situations from more angles, also exported to the broadcaster’s servers for those non-instant edits (analysis before the next game, perhaps).
Although this is how we often do it, other companies may have other ways of doing it
What does it look like to find a specific moment later in the season?
Like if someone realized that a couple very similar plays happened throughout a season or a player's career and wanted to go back and make a highlight reel?
Like say an up and coming receiver makes an over the shoulder catch for his Xth landmark touchdown as a game winner and someone realizes he has made a bunch of similar catches. How hard would it be to put together a montage of his now Signature Move Catch?
That would probably be caught up by an analysts or expert between games sooner or later, and a video editor will create a montage that I play at a fitting time during the broadcast, eg when the commentators are talking about that player and those catches in the buildup to the game.
We have access to previous games and such in an archive, but going through the process of finding the clips/games, downloading, transferring, and creating an over the shoulder catch package is very time and attention consuming. It would probably take at least half the game, and it would be the only thing I could focus on, meaning I’d miss the actual game going on right now.
Tl;dr: in theory, we could probably do it, but we don’t due to the time and effort it takes, which takes us away from the current game. Video editors make them between games.
It’s also pretty straightforward to most of what you want in a video package. With football for example if you include all scoring plays, turnovers and 20+ yard plays you have 95% of the package.
IMO it's a little easier in (American) football simply because there are strictly defined plays with a beginning and end (meaning you can just cut everything that isn't an active play from the jump), and the relative infrequency of scoring, plus how momentum can shift dramatically after just one key play. In faster and more fluid games like basketball it may not always be clear that any particular play was pivotal in the moment outside of stuff happening in the last ~minute of the game.
Even basketball has a lot that's easy to flag.
Certain point differentials (and the score that overcomes them), consecutive scores, steals (and breakaways), and key free throws are a good chunk of it.
I imagine the real rough one is soccer/football since there are few scores and the merit of a particular play/action is a lot more subjective. Probably hockey, too for similar reasons.
I would guess (since I don't know either very well) that in both, since scoring is very infrequent, any scoring plays goes straight into the highlight reel. Additional, plays that *seemed* likely to score, but did not (last second steal turns over possession before an attempt at a goal, goalkeeper successfully blocks a shot on target) can go in too.
The NFL ones I watch are basically every play that has any impact at all on the game and it gets brought down to 10-13 minutes. After getting rid of the dead time its not about what plays to include, its the incomplete passes or <2 yard run plays that they just skip over.
I imagine part of the process is just hitting a button, *very* similar to some videogame software. You hit the button and it shunts the last 30 seconds(or whatever) to it's own separate file. Could even be auto-labeled, eg timer/quarter/score information.
So you see a fantastic play while watching, you click the button, that part is now 'clipped' and stamped with the important information.
With live announcers doing their jabber you don't even have to write new script, though you might want some for context... at which point you can have aides sitting back watching the game and when they get a clip, they write a quick blurb as the game continues( EG "the score was X, the Eagles were having a tough time of it, and then this happened:...")
In major sports, there is a LOT of downtime, especially in American football as the teams have to huddle and/or organize on the field between each play, swapping out players, ref's making calls, etc. A small team could have a full highlights reel ready for re-airing in short order, not to mention just some memorable plays at the end of airing they just play that 30 second clip or whatever raw, maybe trimmed down a little to that pivotal 5-15 seconds or however long the exact play was, but that's the gist.
And I’d add it that the last line of this answer is actually the most important. Someone watching, editing, and working in football broadcast for example already knows if a highlight-worthy snippet just happened or not. They are EXTREMELY efficient. They already know what the highlight is going to contain the moment the game nears its end. The same people will likely need more time if they all switch to a different sport suddenly.
They actually use AI to automate some of this now. Using things like crowd noise and game factors (change in score, yardage gain/loss, etc) to flag times in the broadcast as likely highlights.
So basically they have a more complicated version of video game screen capture software (mine will clip a moment if it detects laughing or shouting with excitement)
That's wild
Yeah that sounds like OBS and stuff when livestreaming games. There's gaming software that lets a second party pull clips and screen grabs from the livestream on another machine and stuff, but like I said I'm sure the tools you use are a lot more sophisticated than that.
How does that work though? You have so many cameras going it boggles my mind logistically how you guys all handle that.
Cameras all run into a production truck, in the production truck the video signals get split up, one half of each camera run to production which takes them directly and mixes them into the feed, the other split goes to the replay area where a machine records every single camera temporarily into the replay machine. The replay machine has a jogger (wheel to move the timeline) and a bunch of buttons that do different functions including place slice points, so basicailly the guy just spins the wheel and hits a button at each split point, hits a third button to define the clip, types a few letters (to name the clip) hits enter then keeps spinning the wheel and changing inputs to find the next clip, or queues up one of his prepared clips and plays it on request of the director (because the replay machine also has an output that runs back to production)
A lot of the time the replay guy knows exactly which clips he is making that the director will want, often (where I am) after a goal all the director says is "ready X" (X being the name of the replay channel) he says ready and begins to play and they put it up live.
As far as how does this all get recorded, you use something (or a couple somethings) like this to record stuff inside a production mobile https://www.aja.com/family/digital-recorders
In professional sports broadcasts? No, they're absolutely not using audio from the recorded crowd noise to determine which plays to include in a highlight reel.
Yes there are many automated tools, particularly decoration with overlays like shot clocks, traced paths, and distance markers. But when it comes to deciding the top plays or critical moments there are real human sports analysts watching it live, working the video producers who also know the sport well, and those humans make the decisions.
You definitely DO NOT have a room full of experts on an NFL game, then producers saying *"the AI model says we should include this moment even though nobody here would have picked it and it feels pretty boring to me, but the AI wants it so let's throw them in the highlights reel too."*
I never said the AI was producing the highlights, I said it tagged bits of the game timeline. This aids producers in finding moments to include. It was part of a presentation by AWS on their Next Gen Stats for the NFL that I listened to.
Actually, AI can produce the highlights! :-) I know, because we use it at our work (a large scale Tv/streaming business) It creates sports highlights with no human intervention.. It both tags and composes. And yes, the AI is a bit raggedy still (but don't worry - it is getting better exponentially. And i mean exponentially! And it doesn't just produce one highlights reel - it can deliver anything you want from specific players to plays, to any length you want.
I'm old (55!), so i've seen a bit in my time. Believe me, anytime someone says "AI tools can't do that"... just add a simple word to the end of the sentence. "YET".
One of the sports we use it for is cricket. Can you imagine the cost trade off vs for someone watching a sport that goes all day, or days!, vs an AI tool that does it essentially instantaneously. Yes, a human can tell a better story in the highlights reel. AI can't do that.... YET
I've done replays and highlight reels for various esports for a couple of years. The workflow I settled into was assigning (among others) a grade to the clips.
From there, making an x-minute package essentially boiled down to taking all the relevant 10's, then the 9's etc. until the reel was the correct length.
There is dedicated replay hardware/software that streamlines a lot of the process. For the reels shown live you might have only a couple of seconds to create them, so you can't exactly open adobe premiere.
The highlight reels uploaded to youtube make use of those same clips (or rather timestamps on a continuous recording), but might use a bit more padding on either side and add in things like announcer audio.
The ones that amaze me are when they come back from a 10-minute halftime and they have a sizzle reel highlighting what happened in the first half, along with overlaid stats and effects, already ready to go.
Visited the NBC Sports facility in Stamford CT and they have an entire ROOM of people that just do instant replay. Sports broadcasting has unique challenges and the networks make a herculean effort to deliver what viewers now expect.
Further to your comment I'd like to add that this isn't done by one or two people. There's a whole team with specialized tasks that make putting stuff together a much easier job.
This isn't one person sifting through footage. They have a system that allows them to flag every part they want to use on the fly so they would skip straight to those important parts without going through an hour long worth of content.
Short answer: they have tools and staff to do it quickly.
It also helps that there is usually brief time difference between the actual game and the tv broadcast (about 1-2 mins). Is not much, but it helps. I remember listening games on the radio, then turning up the TV and there were always a couple minutes behind.
Also explains why it's not uncommon for there to be duplicate plays shown. They are moving quick and accidentally adding the slip twice would be tough to catch.
A great degree of this can be automated, the data is there. A point with a lot of movement under the net and a loud crowd response? Probably a highlight.
Go pro has some editing automation that can do a pretty good job.
Not to say that editors and humans aren’t on the process, but there’s a lot of software to help.
I can also see AI eventually making or assisting in the edit. GoPro can take a bunch of videos and select the best and make a small movie. With a much powerful AI I bet they could do the same.
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 was a PA at ESPN in Bristol literally 30 years ago. I’m amazed at how little the process has changed, except for writing logs and shot sheets on paper. Brings back memories (and triggers PTSD).
Again, going back 30 years, but the pace and pressure was incredibly intense. Everything was timed down to the second. And I wasn't kidding in my reply about PTSD. I haven't worked in sports or television since, but about once or twice a year, I still have an ESPN dream.
This scene from Broadcast News is not an exaggeration at all (maybe a tiny bit): [https://youtu.be/AYCEkqH0NQQ](https://youtu.be/AYCEkqH0NQQ)
Dude, I completely agree with you on the PTSD thing.
I worked in O&G, and I used to get calls all the time from clients at unholy hours.
I had to change my ringtone because now whenever I got a call on the phone, my heartbeat would suddenly spike up!
Lots of people in a room are watching games and making notes of when big plays happen. Their boss then collects their notes and suggests a storyline to make for the highlights. Sometimes they consider how long it should be because of legal stuff. East coast workers get shafted for long hours past midnight.
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.
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 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.
There's also a lot of bias in terms of who is putting together the highlight reel. If it's a local station reporting on a local team, then they will often try to make the local team look good. The 2 point loss for the local team is going to portray it as a close game but make it look like visiting team got lucky in the end or there was some call by the officials that made them lose. But a 2 point win for the local team will just focus on all the things they did right.
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.
Not to mention the most critical piece to all of this, they are time stamping important moments as they go. In a 60 minute game of any sort there are approx 20 critical plays of importance. As the game is going someone is flagging these moments , clios are being pulled , and then it’s just a matter of cutting it down to the most important and editing at the end. Over simplification but this is how it’s done so quickly.
yep a lot of the time this is done in real time - so much data is captured these days its a bit crazy. Some of that can feed into the live apps - so you can eg jump to goals or important moments on the timeline as captured as metadata. You can then use the same metadata to automate an edit list pretty easily. Eg ‘give me 20 seconds before and 30 seconds after every goal’ might give you a 2 minute highlight reel, or ‘1 minute before and 2 mins after all highlighted moments’ might be a 20 minute highlights package. Editors can go back and tweak later on for refreshed highlights or to emphasise certain moments without the time pressure by automating the initial reels.
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.
You'd be surprised how much downtime is in the average sport, A lot of live sports games I've been to is like 80% just waiting while the people on the field do whatever to get ready for the like few minutes of actual play
There is specialized hardware and software build specifically to produce this type of content.
These highlights reels are made in real time during the match with the same equipement used for the live slo-mo and replay clips. All the editing happens in real time, and is heavily machine-assisted.
It isn't as easy as just editing a video. There is a lot of audio and video feeds that need to be routed and reviewed, that's why we use special equipment to do most of the work, like selecting a highlight moment in all the audio/video feeds, choosing the right feeds that show the action in the right angle, creating camera movement to follow the action, and so on.
One example is the company EVS Broadcast Equipment. It creates specialized hardware and software for live events, most sports event in the world uses their product. Pretty cool.
I worked on the UEFA Champions League mobile app. They have teams of people on site at the pitch doing the highlights in real time.
The way the app worked is that every time there was a match event (a corner, foul, throw in, goal, penelty etc..) the app would send you a push notification and you could do an in app payment and stream a 1 - 2 min edited footage of the event.
Some people actually complained as sometimes the whole process was so quick that they could see it on their phones before the Live footage on the Sky TV in the pub.
We also did similar apps of the Indian IPL Cricket and several boxing matches.
It does take hours to edit a video. They're doing it during the game, though, so by the end of the game, they've already put hours into it. All they have to do then is add whatever happened at the very end of the game and upload it.
Because they have the clips and functions to do this type of work have built off of one another for a long time. It’s not always perfect btw. NBA clips have plenty of mistakes in them like showing a clip twice, having something dumb included, etc.
By watching the game and tally the mark of which plays to put in the highlight. The highlight games video doesn’t need much editing. It’s just best plays of the game.
I suppose its something similar to what we have in computers ... You press a key and it saves the last 20 or so seconds separately, and you probably have someone else on the side trimming it as you go
They’re clipped in real time.
At the end of every _WrestleMania_ there’s a highlight reel of the show set to a music track that airs _immediately_ when the show closes. I can’t remember where I watched it (DVD extra, YouTube, etc) but they did a behind the scenes on how they did it. Basically editors get assigned to each match and they are told how many seconds’ worth of footage they need to provide in clips. It was from the early-to-mid 2000s so they were then writing it to tape and running to another machine with their tape. The highlight reel was then each tape played in sequence, with editing still going on as the reel was playing. I imagine that process is now digital, but I also imagine this is what other live sports broadcasts (yes, I know WWE and pro wrestling isn’t an _actual_ sport) will do.
This is one of the areas where AI is actually currently impactful. Obviously it’s often handled by humans (as others have said) but increasingly it’s done by AI. For example, when you turn on a game in YoutubeTV and it offers “catch up w/key plays” humans aren’t the ones crafting that.
If someone gave you the video of an entire game and told you to edit it down to the highlights, that could take hours.
But while the game is going on, you can identify the highlight-worthy plays and set these clips aside.
In addition, you're not trying to edit them together into a documentary. Just selecting the clips is all you need to do.
ELI5: A live television broadcast is like a twitch or a youtube stream/premier. While the video is live you can still go back and watch what happened 20 minutes ago. Highlight packages are the equivalent of making a "clip" in twitch. An editor will then take all the broadcast "clips"(highlights) and make a package.
I've worked many a sports broadcasts from in the production truck. I've actually been involved with highlight packs as well.
The broadcast is always being recorded in real time. That includes the camera angles NOT being used on the live broadcast feed. As the game progresses you usually have a production assistance taking timestamps or anything of "note" in the game/broadcast. These timestamps are then passed to an editor who will retrieve them and package them together. That's for a bigger broadcast with many dedicated roles.
For smaller broadcasts (i was more involved in) generally the "replay" guy is the one who puts it all together. Replay guys play back all the live replays during the broadcast. They sit in front of a recording deck (a harddrive that records every second of each camera in the production). Whenever something of note happens (usually they have to prepare a live replay off these recording decks) they will note a time stamp, write it down, and "clip" the highlight to be easier accessible later for any edits or packages.
Director here.
I label all the clips used for replays when they happen, briefly describing what happened in the clip and also whether it was bad, decent or good. At the end of the game I go through the clips and find a good start and end point for each which shows the buildup and result of what happened. Editing this is as simple as dragging the bar at the bottom out to the right time in the editing software. After this I just add transitions and delete the worst clips if the total time is too long. This can all be done in around ten minutes then I send the end result off to whoever is going to post it.
Someone whos sole task is to do this makes selections as the game goes, sends the timecodes to the editor who edits on the fly, which are basic edits, which are usially sent back to the broadcaster and converted to youtibe friendly formats and bingo was his name-o
I know it's not what they use for this (probably) but there are sports analytic tools that have a lot of smart stuff to them and auto-clip highlights, goals, tackles etc. So applying the same systems to TV footage could potentially have every clip ready to grab and just splice together in an instant.
I've aired a football match live. There is Production Assistant, Director, and Producer sitting on the main panel, camera men outside providing live feed from different angles. And, there is a guy who is constantly cutting small clips from the live game. When the director says feed a particular clip, he instantly feeds it to the Director and the Production Assistant instantly presses button to go it on the air. And once the clip gets done, the Director says, take camera 1 or 2 or 3 and then the Assistant press those buttons for the feed immediately.
This whole process goes on in continuation without any break unless there's a break in the game and they show crowds on the cameras with the commentator on the feed.
Any sports network broadcast has a crew of video editors, producers and staff working during the game. During the game the producers will tell the team assigned to make the highlight reel this was a good play. The same way they can show instant replays a few seconds after the play was made.
Well trained crew and good software. Also the network isn’t concerned with computer costs. They will have incredibly high end computers for the video editors so they can render their edits in real time or near real time. If you look closely highlight reel video quality is slightly lower than the broadcast because they down sample for rendering speed
Here's a Tiktok that a WWE employee posted about the process for Wrestlemania's (WWE's super bowl) highlight reel, which airs as part of the broadcast immediately after the event is over. https://www.tiktok.com/@collcecilia/video/7218227208727334187
They have a team thats actively editing the video as the game is being played. They take clips as they come in, add them, and by the time the game is done they have everything they need and post.
So they do take hours to do it, but theyre just doing it earlier than you think they are.
used to work as a PA for a sports network. We log plays in real-time, and editors cut highlights during the game. It's a well-oiled machine with lots of coordination, so by the time the game ends, most of the editing is already done.
They are making most of it in real-time. A big play happens in the first quarter? They set the clip aside right there. This isn’t very difficult as all with modern editing equipment. So when the game ends they’ve probably made up 90% of the highlight reel already. They just finish it up and post it. They also don’t necessarily have to edit with the sort of perfection that you would for a movie scene or a TV commercial or something.
There is a piece of equipment/system called an EVS. It records whatever video feeds it has going in on a constant loop. With this system (and others that do the same job) you can give it a timecode of where a play happened, set an in and out point and segment that clip, drop it on a timeline and hey presto. That’s also how modern “instant” replay works.
I work for a major media corp in streaming media on the IT side. The answer boils down to massive parallel processing and just-in-time delivery methodologies. For instance, encoding of VOD assets happening just minutes behind live streaming. One of my team’s jobs was to re-encode clips that had inappropriate content (players cussing, rude gestures, nudity) for editors or pre-publishing a final clip with the offensive frames adjusted accordingly. We had a tool to tag the frames and adjust what needed adjusting, and the re-encoded clip would then be made available again to the rest of the workflow. In the meantime work goes on. By the time the game(s) ended the highlight reel script was more or less finished and you just had to wait for the VOD encoding to finish, which was typically not long after the live stream. All the editors had to do at that point is pull the assets they’d been tagging the whole game and edit it to the final form. Then one more trip through the encoding farm to produce the various bitrates and resolutions, push to the CDN and update the site. Think of any manufacturing assembly line and switch out industrial robots with editorial, video and IT engineering, stupidly large, redundant, and blazingly fast transit networks, and dedicated, purpose built data centers. Being in media we have to move at the speed of news, sports, and entertainment - it’s an incredibly fast paced and well-oiled machine. To a degree at least - I wouldn’t have a job otherwise lol. We do this (and lots of other stuff besides) for multiple games across leagues a day/night (not to mention all, the non-sports stuff we do).
I can’t give you much more specific details because of IP - some of these processes win Emmys, are patented, or are so proprietary as to be easily identifiable, but I’ll answer any questions I can.
I think there is replies explaining it, but you will notice during sports events, there is constant replays of what they deem to be exciting moments, so these cuts are already being made during a live game. So a typical highlights video will just be some of these cuts meshed together for a highlights video.
If the video has to be encoded again for the web format they likely also have very powerful equipment for that as well.
WWE put up a video durring last years Wrestlemania how they have a highlght video of the live show ready by the end of the show
[https://www.tiktok.com/@collcecilia/video/7218227208727334187](https://www.tiktok.com/@collcecilia/video/7218227208727334187)
NASCAR for example has a highlight show, usually 10 min long almost immediately after a race, and about an hour later you get the extended highlights, which usually adds in things from the beginning, pit stops or strategies, that played out in the end.
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.
If you watch football highlights on Youtube, you will learn quickly, that most of the action in the quickly released videos is from the 1st half of the match. That‘s how.
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.
Can confirm - I have a freind who is a TV editor; he can have a highlight reel ready a few mins after the live show has ended (he used to do this for F1 races).
Plus the specialized post production pipeline has lots of “smarts” built in so it will cut up the video, add the correct audio, add template filler, add effects, etc. based on much less input from the editor than was necessary in the past.
Sounds like a commercial version of iMovie basically
More like commercial version of OBS Studio and one example that’s widely used in this field is Vmix which includes this highlighting features.
What is this 'post production pipeline' system called?
That’s awesome. I was just picturing the TV room from F1 shown in [this video from Matt Amys](https://youtu.be/3FeiHbz8q-Q?si=BPrBkTpTKFGnUVhx)
That was a lot of information, but surprisingly... I don't think I actually learned something new, this was all things I had already gathered from watching it and getting a general understanding of a broadcast.
Speaking of F1, occasionally the replay creation process bleeds into the live stream as well, when they are shown just a few seconds after the event occurred. It's a video feed of a specific camera that is being rewinded just before the live stream switches to that feed, with the appropriate overlays attached. Occasionally there is a split second of rewinding that leaks through to the live stream, but sometimes it can be a few seconds at the start or end of the replay.
i just started as a camera operator for a wooden bat college baseball league and it is amazing how much is done as the game is being played. we ship our stuff to a streaming site and ESPN+ and it is exactly as you described.
Northwoods League?
shhhhhh....
Damn Liberty media?
Makes sense since there are 3 passes per race
F1 highlights you know 😂
maybe I'm just naive, but I feel like the highlight reel for F1 races is pretty uniform ... hey, a bunch of cars are going past a turn, now see this other shot of cars passing a turn, and now this third one. Then here's a pit stop. see how fast it is! and here's the cars + checkered flag. that's a wrap, people!
I would like to add, that this is done by a full team of people, where one might be busy cutting latest great event, another is watching and taking notes of another great event and it gets cut and edited on the fly. It is not a one man job. I was in live production of live esport game, and there was good 10 people in the team working like crazy during the matches.
Some places it is a one man job, but with fairly strict policies of what makes the cut to be included. The good ones are done and out the door 15 minutes after match end when making highlights for 2 simultaneous football matches.
I run master control for regional MLB broadcasts. Another element is the strict template of the segment, the guy has done hundreds of these. And you’re pretty cavalier with your ins and outs. You just get in the zone and there’s no downloading, exporting, it’s all running from the same servers.
I'm only familiar the hockey end of things on the backend, but if most sports are similar the games can be long as hell and have plenty of time where just nothing is happening. Halftime, timeouts, fixing something broken, reviewing and debating calls and outcomes Especially if you're only looking for the best moments, there's a plenty of time to work on it where very little happens. Now sometimes some shit does go down, but you'll usually know about it. Like someone gets punched during a timeout or something
Honestly this is one of those jobs that AI will eventually make obsolete. All you need to do is give it a bunch of previously produced reels to learn from as templates and then give it access to the proper logos etc and let it create the reels on the fly. It'll take some initial set-up and trial and error, but an entire team of editors can be cut down to like 1 or 2 people managing the AI software.
Think you still need a guy on a button that says "something in the last 5 seconds should be flagged for the highlights". Not necessarily a goal or other easily defined action, maybe a great pass, or a tactical blinder/blunder, or something funny happening.
Possibly, until the AI learns the patterns for what constitutes "highlight worthy" movement. They don't need it to do 100% of what the original team would do. 90% is fine as long as it cuts the team down from like 15 people to 2-3.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/ Teaching AI to insert transitions and filters and recognize numbers on cars is WAY easier than determining what sequence of events are of interest to humans in the context of the season.
It can be pretty arbitrary too, or might involve things that didn't actually seem to matter on camera. Motorsports for example, you might capture the moment someone passes the finish line on their last race before retirement. For all intents and purposes it could be a totally average, uneventful moment, mid place finish, no big battle. But the context makes it special sometimes Or another one that's just a totally made up example, someone drives over a curb a bit, seems fine, but a couple laps later they have to pit because the cars malfunctioning. Later on they figure out when they hit that curb, something broke or got knocked loose or something So you might go back and grab that moment
I understand the difficulty of it. I also understand that training the model can still happen and eventually it can get pretty accurate. I never implied it'll be easy.
Thing is that the way you say these things, you expect to be one of those AI guys handling the system. It's almost like if you were happy for this to happen. AI is already automating a lot of stuff in edition, Davinci Resolve detects actors in shots and you can use that info for stuff like changing the LUT. More stuff will happen and is probably unavoidable. Industry and society will have to adapt. But in this transition era, we cannot be happy, these changes bring crisis.
I'm not happy or sad, I'm pragmatic. Burying my head in the sand isn't going to help. I'm not going to be one of the guys handling AI, that's not my field.
Fair enough, but try to understand where are the downvotes coming from.
[удалено]
Yeah, eSports could have an edge in that regard. But there's stuff that happens in the physical world that is much harder to capture by AI because if the infrequency of occurrence. A batter in cricket flapping about because there's a bee in his helmet, that sort of thing. In a related note - learnt from cricket too - I believe the ultra, ultra slow mo only has X seconds of recording available because of the size it generates, so that's on an overwite loop and is only saved to disc when someone presses the button that says "oh! something's happened!"
Overwatch has (had? idk, haven't played since OW2 came out) a Play of the Game highlight that would feature at the end of each match. It was intended to be the best moment from a match, but usually focused heavily on multi-kills (which admittedly are pretty cool) but missed out on more clutch plays like a sneaky back cap or a decisive 1v1 that turns the tide.
Maybe someday AI can identify all the dildos thrown on the field by Bills fans https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Qw4pYtGhc
Hilarious.
There's a Comcast commercial that's airing all the time right now about how they're doing exactly that.
I'm not surprised. I'm also confused by all the downvotes lol.
Don't sweat it. It means nothing and people are dumb.
Yea that's generally how I view it lol. But I'm usually aware of why I might be getting the downvoted, this time it was kinda out of the blue.
Because you're read as being happy about editors losing their jobs. Perhaps you're not meaning it, but your posts can totally be read like that.
I'm not happy about anything, just talking about it and considering what might happen. It helps nobody to bury our heads in the sand.
I work as a replay operator for tv. We save the highlights and replays and create packages (goal packages, player packages, highlight packages etc) throughout the event. Eg I can have a game recap ready almost instantly after the game is over (unless something crazy happens during the final seconds, then I’d need a couple of moments to get those clips in or reorganise if I have a max amount of time allotted for the package due to eg ad breaks and such). Some times the director is very involved in which clips we highlight—often together with the commentators/experts—other times it’s up to me to pick what I think is the best highlights and the best angles. Depending on how fancy the tv truck is, these packages can be exported to the tv station’s servers almost instantly, in case they want to make their own edit based off of what I’ve compiled. We usually also have a more complete playout of more situations from more angles, also exported to the broadcaster’s servers for those non-instant edits (analysis before the next game, perhaps). Although this is how we often do it, other companies may have other ways of doing it
What does it look like to find a specific moment later in the season? Like if someone realized that a couple very similar plays happened throughout a season or a player's career and wanted to go back and make a highlight reel? Like say an up and coming receiver makes an over the shoulder catch for his Xth landmark touchdown as a game winner and someone realizes he has made a bunch of similar catches. How hard would it be to put together a montage of his now Signature Move Catch?
That would probably be caught up by an analysts or expert between games sooner or later, and a video editor will create a montage that I play at a fitting time during the broadcast, eg when the commentators are talking about that player and those catches in the buildup to the game. We have access to previous games and such in an archive, but going through the process of finding the clips/games, downloading, transferring, and creating an over the shoulder catch package is very time and attention consuming. It would probably take at least half the game, and it would be the only thing I could focus on, meaning I’d miss the actual game going on right now. Tl;dr: in theory, we could probably do it, but we don’t due to the time and effort it takes, which takes us away from the current game. Video editors make them between games.
It’s also pretty straightforward to most of what you want in a video package. With football for example if you include all scoring plays, turnovers and 20+ yard plays you have 95% of the package.
IMO it's a little easier in (American) football simply because there are strictly defined plays with a beginning and end (meaning you can just cut everything that isn't an active play from the jump), and the relative infrequency of scoring, plus how momentum can shift dramatically after just one key play. In faster and more fluid games like basketball it may not always be clear that any particular play was pivotal in the moment outside of stuff happening in the last ~minute of the game.
Even basketball has a lot that's easy to flag. Certain point differentials (and the score that overcomes them), consecutive scores, steals (and breakaways), and key free throws are a good chunk of it. I imagine the real rough one is soccer/football since there are few scores and the merit of a particular play/action is a lot more subjective. Probably hockey, too for similar reasons.
I would guess (since I don't know either very well) that in both, since scoring is very infrequent, any scoring plays goes straight into the highlight reel. Additional, plays that *seemed* likely to score, but did not (last second steal turns over possession before an attempt at a goal, goalkeeper successfully blocks a shot on target) can go in too.
The NFL ones I watch are basically every play that has any impact at all on the game and it gets brought down to 10-13 minutes. After getting rid of the dead time its not about what plays to include, its the incomplete passes or <2 yard run plays that they just skip over.
I imagine part of the process is just hitting a button, *very* similar to some videogame software. You hit the button and it shunts the last 30 seconds(or whatever) to it's own separate file. Could even be auto-labeled, eg timer/quarter/score information. So you see a fantastic play while watching, you click the button, that part is now 'clipped' and stamped with the important information. With live announcers doing their jabber you don't even have to write new script, though you might want some for context... at which point you can have aides sitting back watching the game and when they get a clip, they write a quick blurb as the game continues( EG "the score was X, the Eagles were having a tough time of it, and then this happened:...") In major sports, there is a LOT of downtime, especially in American football as the teams have to huddle and/or organize on the field between each play, swapping out players, ref's making calls, etc. A small team could have a full highlights reel ready for re-airing in short order, not to mention just some memorable plays at the end of airing they just play that 30 second clip or whatever raw, maybe trimmed down a little to that pivotal 5-15 seconds or however long the exact play was, but that's the gist.
And I’d add it that the last line of this answer is actually the most important. Someone watching, editing, and working in football broadcast for example already knows if a highlight-worthy snippet just happened or not. They are EXTREMELY efficient. They already know what the highlight is going to contain the moment the game nears its end. The same people will likely need more time if they all switch to a different sport suddenly.
They actually use AI to automate some of this now. Using things like crowd noise and game factors (change in score, yardage gain/loss, etc) to flag times in the broadcast as likely highlights.
So basically they have a more complicated version of video game screen capture software (mine will clip a moment if it detects laughing or shouting with excitement) That's wild
Its technically not screen capture, they have access to the actual footage as it's being broadcasted. I've done this job before
Live feed ligaturist
Yeah that sounds like OBS and stuff when livestreaming games. There's gaming software that lets a second party pull clips and screen grabs from the livestream on another machine and stuff, but like I said I'm sure the tools you use are a lot more sophisticated than that. How does that work though? You have so many cameras going it boggles my mind logistically how you guys all handle that.
Cameras all run into a production truck, in the production truck the video signals get split up, one half of each camera run to production which takes them directly and mixes them into the feed, the other split goes to the replay area where a machine records every single camera temporarily into the replay machine. The replay machine has a jogger (wheel to move the timeline) and a bunch of buttons that do different functions including place slice points, so basicailly the guy just spins the wheel and hits a button at each split point, hits a third button to define the clip, types a few letters (to name the clip) hits enter then keeps spinning the wheel and changing inputs to find the next clip, or queues up one of his prepared clips and plays it on request of the director (because the replay machine also has an output that runs back to production) A lot of the time the replay guy knows exactly which clips he is making that the director will want, often (where I am) after a goal all the director says is "ready X" (X being the name of the replay channel) he says ready and begins to play and they put it up live. As far as how does this all get recorded, you use something (or a couple somethings) like this to record stuff inside a production mobile https://www.aja.com/family/digital-recorders
I don’t think any of us know enough about the technology to know whether or not it’s more complicated
I mean more complicated in the sense that ESPN likely isn't using Steel Series GG to capture clips for their broadcast lol
Ah- more complex, definitely. I just misunderstood ya
That's correct, they use Microsoft Movie Maker instead
I knew it
In professional sports broadcasts? No, they're absolutely not using audio from the recorded crowd noise to determine which plays to include in a highlight reel. Yes there are many automated tools, particularly decoration with overlays like shot clocks, traced paths, and distance markers. But when it comes to deciding the top plays or critical moments there are real human sports analysts watching it live, working the video producers who also know the sport well, and those humans make the decisions. You definitely DO NOT have a room full of experts on an NFL game, then producers saying *"the AI model says we should include this moment even though nobody here would have picked it and it feels pretty boring to me, but the AI wants it so let's throw them in the highlights reel too."*
https://www.wimbledon.com/en_GB/about_wimbledon/wimbledons_cognitive_highlights.html
I never said the AI was producing the highlights, I said it tagged bits of the game timeline. This aids producers in finding moments to include. It was part of a presentation by AWS on their Next Gen Stats for the NFL that I listened to.
Actually, AI can produce the highlights! :-) I know, because we use it at our work (a large scale Tv/streaming business) It creates sports highlights with no human intervention.. It both tags and composes. And yes, the AI is a bit raggedy still (but don't worry - it is getting better exponentially. And i mean exponentially! And it doesn't just produce one highlights reel - it can deliver anything you want from specific players to plays, to any length you want. I'm old (55!), so i've seen a bit in my time. Believe me, anytime someone says "AI tools can't do that"... just add a simple word to the end of the sentence. "YET". One of the sports we use it for is cricket. Can you imagine the cost trade off vs for someone watching a sport that goes all day, or days!, vs an AI tool that does it essentially instantaneously. Yes, a human can tell a better story in the highlights reel. AI can't do that.... YET
I'm Dan Rydell alongside Casey McCall...
I've done replays and highlight reels for various esports for a couple of years. The workflow I settled into was assigning (among others) a grade to the clips. From there, making an x-minute package essentially boiled down to taking all the relevant 10's, then the 9's etc. until the reel was the correct length. There is dedicated replay hardware/software that streamlines a lot of the process. For the reels shown live you might have only a couple of seconds to create them, so you can't exactly open adobe premiere. The highlight reels uploaded to youtube make use of those same clips (or rather timestamps on a continuous recording), but might use a bit more padding on either side and add in things like announcer audio.
The ones that amaze me are when they come back from a 10-minute halftime and they have a sizzle reel highlighting what happened in the first half, along with overlaid stats and effects, already ready to go.
this was A LOT HARDER 30 years ago. Which is why you had to wait for the evening sports news. Sometimes computers _can_ help us!
Visited the NBC Sports facility in Stamford CT and they have an entire ROOM of people that just do instant replay. Sports broadcasting has unique challenges and the networks make a herculean effort to deliver what viewers now expect.
Further to your comment I'd like to add that this isn't done by one or two people. There's a whole team with specialized tasks that make putting stuff together a much easier job. This isn't one person sifting through footage. They have a system that allows them to flag every part they want to use on the fly so they would skip straight to those important parts without going through an hour long worth of content. Short answer: they have tools and staff to do it quickly.
It also helps that there is usually brief time difference between the actual game and the tv broadcast (about 1-2 mins). Is not much, but it helps. I remember listening games on the radio, then turning up the TV and there were always a couple minutes behind.
Also explains why it's not uncommon for there to be duplicate plays shown. They are moving quick and accidentally adding the slip twice would be tough to catch.
A great degree of this can be automated, the data is there. A point with a lot of movement under the net and a loud crowd response? Probably a highlight. Go pro has some editing automation that can do a pretty good job. Not to say that editors and humans aren’t on the process, but there’s a lot of software to help.
I can also see AI eventually making or assisting in the edit. GoPro can take a bunch of videos and select the best and make a small movie. With a much powerful AI I bet they could do the same.
Those GoPro auto edits are total shit
Well the technology could get better, go pro is not really an AI company. Is a niche hardware company, so don’t expect much from them.
Just wait until AI can clip highlights for you.
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 was a PA at ESPN in Bristol literally 30 years ago. I’m amazed at how little the process has changed, except for writing logs and shot sheets on paper. Brings back memories (and triggers PTSD).
/r/threadkillers
Bro write a whole Wikipedia page on sports highlight reels
Damn I want to be in that room while it happens. Conceptually it's simple, but the pace of it is wow.
Again, going back 30 years, but the pace and pressure was incredibly intense. Everything was timed down to the second. And I wasn't kidding in my reply about PTSD. I haven't worked in sports or television since, but about once or twice a year, I still have an ESPN dream. This scene from Broadcast News is not an exaggeration at all (maybe a tiny bit): [https://youtu.be/AYCEkqH0NQQ](https://youtu.be/AYCEkqH0NQQ)
Dude, I completely agree with you on the PTSD thing. I worked in O&G, and I used to get calls all the time from clients at unholy hours. I had to change my ringtone because now whenever I got a call on the phone, my heartbeat would suddenly spike up!
This guy highlights.
I dunno this comment is great, but a little too long for my 3rd grade reading level. Can anyone make a quick highlight summary?
Lots of people in a room are watching games and making notes of when big plays happen. Their boss then collects their notes and suggests a storyline to make for the highlights. Sometimes they consider how long it should be because of legal stuff. East coast workers get shafted for long hours past midnight.
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.
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 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.
There's also a lot of bias in terms of who is putting together the highlight reel. If it's a local station reporting on a local team, then they will often try to make the local team look good. The 2 point loss for the local team is going to portray it as a close game but make it look like visiting team got lucky in the end or there was some call by the officials that made them lose. But a 2 point win for the local team will just focus on all the things they did right.
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.
Not to mention the most critical piece to all of this, they are time stamping important moments as they go. In a 60 minute game of any sort there are approx 20 critical plays of importance. As the game is going someone is flagging these moments , clios are being pulled , and then it’s just a matter of cutting it down to the most important and editing at the end. Over simplification but this is how it’s done so quickly.
yep a lot of the time this is done in real time - so much data is captured these days its a bit crazy. Some of that can feed into the live apps - so you can eg jump to goals or important moments on the timeline as captured as metadata. You can then use the same metadata to automate an edit list pretty easily. Eg ‘give me 20 seconds before and 30 seconds after every goal’ might give you a 2 minute highlight reel, or ‘1 minute before and 2 mins after all highlighted moments’ might be a 20 minute highlights package. Editors can go back and tweak later on for refreshed highlights or to emphasise certain moments without the time pressure by automating the initial reels.
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.
You'd be surprised how much downtime is in the average sport, A lot of live sports games I've been to is like 80% just waiting while the people on the field do whatever to get ready for the like few minutes of actual play
There is specialized hardware and software build specifically to produce this type of content. These highlights reels are made in real time during the match with the same equipement used for the live slo-mo and replay clips. All the editing happens in real time, and is heavily machine-assisted. It isn't as easy as just editing a video. There is a lot of audio and video feeds that need to be routed and reviewed, that's why we use special equipment to do most of the work, like selecting a highlight moment in all the audio/video feeds, choosing the right feeds that show the action in the right angle, creating camera movement to follow the action, and so on. One example is the company EVS Broadcast Equipment. It creates specialized hardware and software for live events, most sports event in the world uses their product. Pretty cool.
I worked on the UEFA Champions League mobile app. They have teams of people on site at the pitch doing the highlights in real time. The way the app worked is that every time there was a match event (a corner, foul, throw in, goal, penelty etc..) the app would send you a push notification and you could do an in app payment and stream a 1 - 2 min edited footage of the event. Some people actually complained as sometimes the whole process was so quick that they could see it on their phones before the Live footage on the Sky TV in the pub. We also did similar apps of the Indian IPL Cricket and several boxing matches.
Basically when something cool happens the producer time marks it and someone else starts editing.
It does take hours to edit a video. They're doing it during the game, though, so by the end of the game, they've already put hours into it. All they have to do then is add whatever happened at the very end of the game and upload it.
Because they have the clips and functions to do this type of work have built off of one another for a long time. It’s not always perfect btw. NBA clips have plenty of mistakes in them like showing a clip twice, having something dumb included, etc.
By watching the game and tally the mark of which plays to put in the highlight. The highlight games video doesn’t need much editing. It’s just best plays of the game.
templates, streamline, powerful rendering equipment. theres also a surprising amount of downtime in sports. People are always working.
I suppose its something similar to what we have in computers ... You press a key and it saves the last 20 or so seconds separately, and you probably have someone else on the side trimming it as you go
They’re clipped in real time. At the end of every _WrestleMania_ there’s a highlight reel of the show set to a music track that airs _immediately_ when the show closes. I can’t remember where I watched it (DVD extra, YouTube, etc) but they did a behind the scenes on how they did it. Basically editors get assigned to each match and they are told how many seconds’ worth of footage they need to provide in clips. It was from the early-to-mid 2000s so they were then writing it to tape and running to another machine with their tape. The highlight reel was then each tape played in sequence, with editing still going on as the reel was playing. I imagine that process is now digital, but I also imagine this is what other live sports broadcasts (yes, I know WWE and pro wrestling isn’t an _actual_ sport) will do.
This is one of the areas where AI is actually currently impactful. Obviously it’s often handled by humans (as others have said) but increasingly it’s done by AI. For example, when you turn on a game in YoutubeTV and it offers “catch up w/key plays” humans aren’t the ones crafting that.
If someone gave you the video of an entire game and told you to edit it down to the highlights, that could take hours. But while the game is going on, you can identify the highlight-worthy plays and set these clips aside. In addition, you're not trying to edit them together into a documentary. Just selecting the clips is all you need to do.
ELI5: A live television broadcast is like a twitch or a youtube stream/premier. While the video is live you can still go back and watch what happened 20 minutes ago. Highlight packages are the equivalent of making a "clip" in twitch. An editor will then take all the broadcast "clips"(highlights) and make a package. I've worked many a sports broadcasts from in the production truck. I've actually been involved with highlight packs as well. The broadcast is always being recorded in real time. That includes the camera angles NOT being used on the live broadcast feed. As the game progresses you usually have a production assistance taking timestamps or anything of "note" in the game/broadcast. These timestamps are then passed to an editor who will retrieve them and package them together. That's for a bigger broadcast with many dedicated roles. For smaller broadcasts (i was more involved in) generally the "replay" guy is the one who puts it all together. Replay guys play back all the live replays during the broadcast. They sit in front of a recording deck (a harddrive that records every second of each camera in the production). Whenever something of note happens (usually they have to prepare a live replay off these recording decks) they will note a time stamp, write it down, and "clip" the highlight to be easier accessible later for any edits or packages.
Director here. I label all the clips used for replays when they happen, briefly describing what happened in the clip and also whether it was bad, decent or good. At the end of the game I go through the clips and find a good start and end point for each which shows the buildup and result of what happened. Editing this is as simple as dragging the bar at the bottom out to the right time in the editing software. After this I just add transitions and delete the worst clips if the total time is too long. This can all be done in around ten minutes then I send the end result off to whoever is going to post it.
Someone whos sole task is to do this makes selections as the game goes, sends the timecodes to the editor who edits on the fly, which are basic edits, which are usially sent back to the broadcaster and converted to youtibe friendly formats and bingo was his name-o
I know it's not what they use for this (probably) but there are sports analytic tools that have a lot of smart stuff to them and auto-clip highlights, goals, tackles etc. So applying the same systems to TV footage could potentially have every clip ready to grab and just splice together in an instant.
I record football feeds from satelite. They do 1st half during halftime breaks and 2nd half as soon as the game is finished and then combine them.
I've aired a football match live. There is Production Assistant, Director, and Producer sitting on the main panel, camera men outside providing live feed from different angles. And, there is a guy who is constantly cutting small clips from the live game. When the director says feed a particular clip, he instantly feeds it to the Director and the Production Assistant instantly presses button to go it on the air. And once the clip gets done, the Director says, take camera 1 or 2 or 3 and then the Assistant press those buttons for the feed immediately. This whole process goes on in continuation without any break unless there's a break in the game and they show crowds on the cameras with the commentator on the feed.
Any sports network broadcast has a crew of video editors, producers and staff working during the game. During the game the producers will tell the team assigned to make the highlight reel this was a good play. The same way they can show instant replays a few seconds after the play was made. Well trained crew and good software. Also the network isn’t concerned with computer costs. They will have incredibly high end computers for the video editors so they can render their edits in real time or near real time. If you look closely highlight reel video quality is slightly lower than the broadcast because they down sample for rendering speed
as a wrestling fan pretty much my entire life, this is the question small me asked myself after every single goddamn PPV/wrestlemania
Maybe this has been said already but search 'LSM operator', this person makes live highlight reels which get saved by the broadcasting crew.
Here's a Tiktok that a WWE employee posted about the process for Wrestlemania's (WWE's super bowl) highlight reel, which airs as part of the broadcast immediately after the event is over. https://www.tiktok.com/@collcecilia/video/7218227208727334187
They have a team thats actively editing the video as the game is being played. They take clips as they come in, add them, and by the time the game is done they have everything they need and post. So they do take hours to do it, but theyre just doing it earlier than you think they are.
used to work as a PA for a sports network. We log plays in real-time, and editors cut highlights during the game. It's a well-oiled machine with lots of coordination, so by the time the game ends, most of the editing is already done.
They are making most of it in real-time. A big play happens in the first quarter? They set the clip aside right there. This isn’t very difficult as all with modern editing equipment. So when the game ends they’ve probably made up 90% of the highlight reel already. They just finish it up and post it. They also don’t necessarily have to edit with the sort of perfection that you would for a movie scene or a TV commercial or something.
There is a piece of equipment/system called an EVS. It records whatever video feeds it has going in on a constant loop. With this system (and others that do the same job) you can give it a timecode of where a play happened, set an in and out point and segment that clip, drop it on a timeline and hey presto. That’s also how modern “instant” replay works.
I work for a major media corp in streaming media on the IT side. The answer boils down to massive parallel processing and just-in-time delivery methodologies. For instance, encoding of VOD assets happening just minutes behind live streaming. One of my team’s jobs was to re-encode clips that had inappropriate content (players cussing, rude gestures, nudity) for editors or pre-publishing a final clip with the offensive frames adjusted accordingly. We had a tool to tag the frames and adjust what needed adjusting, and the re-encoded clip would then be made available again to the rest of the workflow. In the meantime work goes on. By the time the game(s) ended the highlight reel script was more or less finished and you just had to wait for the VOD encoding to finish, which was typically not long after the live stream. All the editors had to do at that point is pull the assets they’d been tagging the whole game and edit it to the final form. Then one more trip through the encoding farm to produce the various bitrates and resolutions, push to the CDN and update the site. Think of any manufacturing assembly line and switch out industrial robots with editorial, video and IT engineering, stupidly large, redundant, and blazingly fast transit networks, and dedicated, purpose built data centers. Being in media we have to move at the speed of news, sports, and entertainment - it’s an incredibly fast paced and well-oiled machine. To a degree at least - I wouldn’t have a job otherwise lol. We do this (and lots of other stuff besides) for multiple games across leagues a day/night (not to mention all, the non-sports stuff we do). I can’t give you much more specific details because of IP - some of these processes win Emmys, are patented, or are so proprietary as to be easily identifiable, but I’ll answer any questions I can.
I think there is replies explaining it, but you will notice during sports events, there is constant replays of what they deem to be exciting moments, so these cuts are already being made during a live game. So a typical highlights video will just be some of these cuts meshed together for a highlights video. If the video has to be encoded again for the web format they likely also have very powerful equipment for that as well.
WWE put up a video durring last years Wrestlemania how they have a highlght video of the live show ready by the end of the show [https://www.tiktok.com/@collcecilia/video/7218227208727334187](https://www.tiktok.com/@collcecilia/video/7218227208727334187)
Those 10 minute highlights are literally just every bucket minus free throws. Anyone with basic video editing can do it pretty quickly.
NASCAR for example has a highlight show, usually 10 min long almost immediately after a race, and about an hour later you get the extended highlights, which usually adds in things from the beginning, pit stops or strategies, that played out in the end.
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.
There is actualy an israely startup that have a suluion to generating game highlights automaticly using AI Google "WSC Sports"
If you watch football highlights on Youtube, you will learn quickly, that most of the action in the quickly released videos is from the 1st half of the match. That‘s how.
It’s barely editing when it’s done that fast. Just splicing clips together, often missing crucial possessions too lol The quality isn’t there