I already wrote this, but I'll repost it anyway: Remember Japan last year. Online onboarding was just terrible because of bad weather. However, FIA have released Munster's full onboard - th-cam.com/video/lo2d1orhzoA/w-d-xo.html This means they have access to the storage media from the cameras. So they can post a high-quality recording of the onboards after the race. That is, if they had been tasked with publishing good, high-quality onboards with telemetry after the race, they would have done it.
i think it's not only the cameras but, the signal that transmitted from the onboard camera to the broadcast center/production center. Maybe in some countries, they don't have any good signal transmitter (idk, maybe satellites, or 5G?) and aggravated by place of the race like in the middle of forest/remote areas. So I think it's combination of both aspects.
Yes, that's right, I've been watching WRC for several years now. Commentators sometimes discuss this point. At some of events this year, there was a situation when either there were no online onboards at all, or there were very few. This situation was due to malfunctions of repeaters (devices that transmit the signal). It was either in Poland or Latvia. This also happens a lot in bad weather. Remember Japan last year. Online onboarding was just terrible because of this. However, FIA have released Munster's full onboard - th-cam.com/video/lo2d1orhzoA/w-d-xo.html This means they have access to the storage media from the cameras. So they can post a high-quality recording of the onboards after the race. But they don't. The quality of the recording is crap, as is the quality of the work with this material (in my opinion). It's a shame. After all, they're the only ones with access to Rally1 and Rally2 cars.
There is no excuse, there should be a gopro inside the car and the quality footage should be edited in for those who don't watch live at least. I decided to give WRC my hard earned money not long ago and I was extremely disapointed.. low onboard footage quality, awkward interviews, dull commentary..
To be fair, at least this year they are showing proper onboards with the steering wheel input visible and proper field of view. For years we only had these crappy low FoV bonnet cameras.
your prototype is spot on, great job. It's a shame that WRC is hidden behind a pay wall that does nothing with the most impressive motorsport series. Also cameras like this can show advertisers better, like they are doing in the halo of F1
Thanks! "They do nothing with the most impressive motorsport series". I completely agree. Rally is a fantastic sport that deserves much more than the product that FIA are currently producing.
Have you seen onboards around 2014? They look much better even on 720p! Not sure if they were streaming it over TV or wifi though, I only started watching in 2017 so I don't know.
One thing is live footage vs recorded footage. You cant compare quality issues of both because of technical things you have to think about before the shoot. Second thing is what are you going to show: information or different camera angles w. different Fovs or just immersion of speed? For me i would like to have the pedals shown as well or at least the input of them with a graph. I dont need the codriver to be shown. I also dont need the drivers helmet front, wheel and hand are enough with shifting and hb. Windshield depends on if you have wide angle, the fov is ruined when the angle is too high otherwise the sense of speed will be killed..and and and.... There is no law, how to film onboards. It depends on, what info you re going to transport and what form (live, recorded, transmitted, info or reel for promocuts for commercials...) you wanna shoot. And there are different ways to do all of them.
Yes, they have and have had for years many things that require significant improvements. From the shakedown live stream to the onboard videos they upload to the camera placement within the car. And I'm not talking about some other things because they're unrelated to onboard cameras, and some things have been improved recently: say, the narrow FOV nonsense almost doesn't exist now, and the dashcams are pointing fairly straight most of the time, compared to years ago where they could be pointing totally sideways and thus ruining the cornering feeling, or everything for that matter. One that is related is how they show us onboard cameras on totally boring places and on straight lines, and when a corner is coming, they cut it off. Why!? For example, watch Ogier's onboard compilation for the 2021 season they made a few years ago. It's unwatchable and largely useless. Very short clips showing nothing at all, and when something cool is about to happen, they switch it to something else. Most likely to the facecam. This is the most upsetting thing about them: why do they focus so much on the frigging and useless facecam? In that Ogier compilation it's specially ridiculous. But also on uploaded onboard videos, they have the dashcam as the main view and the facecam is at the bottom-left in a square. Good. But then, they switch places and now the facecam is in the main view and the dashcam in the small square. Utter nonsense. Or having the cam-behind-the-seats like in Neuville's onboard with a good placement so that we can see the steering wheel, but then they put that useless facecam located behind the steering wheel right on top of the steering wheel of the main view, basically ruining the whole point of that cam-behind-the-seats. And for nothing, because the main view already has the frigging steering wheel at sight. It's great to see the drivers at work with the facecam, to see their face expressions and shifting and handbrake inputs, but that has to be shown to us *without* compromising the driving action. I don't want to only see the driver at work, I also need to see the result of that work - the driving; the road. So they should place that thing at the bottom-right, covering the pacenotes as they are unreadable to us anyway given the video quality; and never make the facecam the main view. And then, the bumpercams are terrible. They don't allow us to see the weight transfer of the car, the sway of the chassis, the bumps, the ruts, nothing. Since we are not seeing the car, we can't interpret how it moves in relation to the environment. All we see is a camera floating through the stage, which is a terrible thing to do to rally, as the cars are battling hard against the road. Another terrible thing is that we can't appreciate the sideways action, because a car sliding is like a compass: the tip barely moves, the pencil part is the one which does. So, the more towards the rear a camera is located, the more we can feel the sideways action. And where is the bumpercam located? Right at the front. Garbage. We also need to see the car to have a reference of how aligned it is to the road, that's why dashcams are great: they show you the dash and the bonnet, so your brain can understand the sideways angle yet still show you the road in great detail. Rally is so special in this regard, one of the few top-level motorsports where sideways is used as a technique to go fast, and they hide it away with that mediocre camera location. We can't even appreciate the scenery, because it's so low on the ground it ruins the perspective. We can't even see the sponsors!
I completely agree with what you wrote. Switching to facial expressions, I wanted to talk about this in the video, but I thought maybe some part of the audience would be interested in watching this. I'm not interested. The most important thing is the road and the pilot's reaction to the unique challenges that each stage offers. I also agree only to this facecam in place of the co-driver's notebook. It would be better if this camera were not placed at all, provided that the steering wheel, shifter and handbrake are visible in the main frame instead. In general, I agree with your view of the situation. People write to me that I complain too much about everything. But as I see from your text, I am not the only one who thinks that people who make onboards have no idea what, how and why they do it. Naturally, everyone has their own individual wishes; for me, for example, good image quality and telemetry display are very important. You can't please everyone, I get that. But to make so many bad decisions in this genre when you're the only one with access to such unique material is, in my opinion, unforgivable.
@@imagineracer I believe the facecam should be there in a small part of the video for these reasons: a) if placed on the door of the co-driver and pointing towards the driver, you can see how much they are pulling the handbrake, which is something you can't see from the camera behind the seats. Although this seems to be a problem at least on the GR Yaris Rally1, as in that car the handbrake seems to be pulled diagonally - that is to say, the driver pulls it not only backwards, but also towards his body. So from the perspective of the door camera, you can't see its real travel; it looks like they are barely pulling it. Still, Rally1 cars seem to have less travel in their handbrake levers compared to the WRC cars. If you don't know what camera I'm referring to, watch Tänak's onboard at Kenya 2024 on the official channel. That's the one I mean, at the bottom-left. b) You can see on the driver's face how he gets surprised and concerned about things you would otherwise not realize just by watching the video, such as grip changes, loss of stability, hard-to-see rocks or other hazards, etc. Also on that onboard from Tänak, watch at 13:43 how he goes off the road, and how he reacts. He is quite expressive, a lot of drivers in fact. That's not a great example, because it's quite obvious what's happening there. But it's the one I can give you the timestamp of. Also watch the Ogier vs. Tänak onboard at Croatia 2023. In several places Tänak makes some facial expressions of surprise, where I couldn't tell something's wrong or tricky just by watching the steering input and car behavior. c) It engages nice with non-enthusiasts, those who don't understand motorsport nor race driving. They see the focus in their faces (specially in people like Evans!) and the lack of blinking from them, and they get a slight notion of the concentration that's needed for rally. This makes numbers in the views count of the video, which the WRC heavily needs. Telemetry would be nice, but to me it's more exciting to see a properly-placed pedal camera. Watch Tänak's onboard at the Power Stage of Rally Portugal 2022. That's totally exciting to me, even though the quality is garbage, the FOV of the dashcam is too narrow, and they are covering the entirety of the car, not allowing me to properly see how aligned it is to the road as I explained in my previous comment. The pedal camera could be better placed though, to properly see both pedals and how much they are pressed. In fact I believe the teams don't want the telemetry on the live feed to be precise, they want to hide stuff as usual. So I would prefer the pedal camera.
The difference is that WRC is live streaming with the cameras and they cant get much bitrate like you do in recording a video, the WRC onboard videos are just recordings of the live streams. And the teams are not happy with putting plus 2 kilos worth of camera equipment on the car just so the WRC can have a better video quality..
The weight of the camera is already an argument. But now it is 2024. There are now modern models of small and light cameras that record video in very good quality (4k, 8k). Why can't they install one such camera specifically for recording onboards (not for online broadcasting), so that they can then publish such good, high-quality onboards from top Rally1 cars? There is no talk of 2 kilograms. Such cameras weigh 100-200 grams maximum.
yea, FIA should clearly increase the quality of these rally broadcast, but there are few things to mention: 1) unfortunatly now rally is much less popular than F1. For sure the poor broadcast plays a huge role there 2) it's really really hard to translate this type of motorsport. There is no race track or smth, pure roads and forest. So even though there are 2-3 helicopters always watching cars, TV signal still be pretty bad sometimes, cuz of the connection problem.
I totally agree. Showing rally is probably the hardest task if you take all kinds of sports. The only thing is, I don't know if they have access to sd\microsd cards from cameras. Logically, they probably do. In that case, the question remains, why are their onboards so inferior compared to amateur onboards?
"Why FIA can't use a good quality camera like any ordinary ppl with a cheap Gopro?" THE ANSWER IS: Because those professional cameras are built for on-the-air live coverage streamings for RallyTV Not to record videos in 4K onto a storage device for late editing That's simple af. No need to complain on everything.
Well, that's too bad. They have onboards section on the Rally TV website. It turns out that these are just leftovers from live broadcasts. You like the state of affairs, I don't. Okay.
@@imagineracer Most of the time quality is shit bc belive it or not, connection in forests is shit. Quality overall is not bad and they only have connection to the helicopter which then sends the data to broadcasters
Yep, I agree when we talk about online broadcasting. We also have big problems in transmitting a direct signal during bad weather. Remember Japan last year. Online onboarding was just terrible because of this. However, FIA have released Munster's full onboard - th-cam.com/video/lo2d1orhzoA/w-d-xo.html This means they have access to the storage media from the cameras. So they can post a high-quality recording of the onboards after the race. But they don't.
fia onbords are recording live, so quality is lower for better Internet transmission and longer battery life i think
I already wrote this, but I'll repost it anyway: Remember Japan last year. Online onboarding was just terrible because of bad weather. However, FIA have released Munster's full onboard - th-cam.com/video/lo2d1orhzoA/w-d-xo.html
This means they have access to the storage media from the cameras. So they can post a high-quality recording of the onboards after the race. That is, if they had been tasked with publishing good, high-quality onboards with telemetry after the race, they would have done it.
i think it's not only the cameras but, the signal that transmitted from the onboard camera to the broadcast center/production center. Maybe in some countries, they don't have any good signal transmitter (idk, maybe satellites, or 5G?) and aggravated by place of the race like in the middle of forest/remote areas. So I think it's combination of both aspects.
Yes, that's right, I've been watching WRC for several years now. Commentators sometimes discuss this point. At some of events this year, there was a situation when either there were no online onboards at all, or there were very few. This situation was due to malfunctions of repeaters (devices that transmit the signal). It was either in Poland or Latvia.
This also happens a lot in bad weather. Remember Japan last year. Online onboarding was just terrible because of this.
However, FIA have released Munster's full onboard - th-cam.com/video/lo2d1orhzoA/w-d-xo.html
This means they have access to the storage media from the cameras. So they can post a high-quality recording of the onboards after the race. But they don't. The quality of the recording is crap, as is the quality of the work with this material (in my opinion).
It's a shame. After all, they're the only ones with access to Rally1 and Rally2 cars.
There is no excuse, there should be a gopro inside the car and the quality footage should be edited in for those who don't watch live at least. I decided to give WRC my hard earned money not long ago and I was extremely disapointed.. low onboard footage quality, awkward interviews, dull commentary..
To be fair, at least this year they are showing proper onboards with the steering wheel input visible and proper field of view. For years we only had these crappy low FoV bonnet cameras.
your prototype is spot on, great job. It's a shame that WRC is hidden behind a pay wall that does nothing with the most impressive motorsport series. Also cameras like this can show advertisers better, like they are doing in the halo of F1
Thanks! "They do nothing with the most impressive motorsport series". I completely agree. Rally is a fantastic sport that deserves much more than the product that FIA are currently producing.
I think the problem is in bad cameras. They apparently don't consider showing the rally a priority.
Yes, I agree. Bad cameras are 100% one of the main reasons why their onboards is so bad.
I would like to see some of the footage, including your prototype, put through a good AI upscaler.
Have you seen onboards around 2014? They look much better even on 720p!
Not sure if they were streaming it over TV or wifi though, I only started watching in 2017 so I don't know.
Yep, I've seen videos like that. Here is an onboard from 1999, the quality is at the same level as now - th-cam.com/video/O9QaBKc22FI/w-d-xo.html
@@imagineracer it is! Hahha
One thing is live footage vs recorded footage. You cant compare quality issues of both because of technical things you have to think about before the shoot.
Second thing is what are you going to show: information or different camera angles w. different Fovs or just immersion of speed?
For me i would like to have the pedals shown as well or at least the input of them with a graph. I dont need the codriver to be shown. I also dont need the drivers helmet front, wheel and hand are enough with shifting and hb.
Windshield depends on if you have wide angle, the fov is ruined when the angle is too high otherwise the sense of speed will be killed..and and and....
There is no law, how to film onboards. It depends on, what info you re going to transport and what form (live, recorded, transmitted, info or reel for promocuts for commercials...) you wanna shoot.
And there are different ways to do all of them.
Yes, they have and have had for years many things that require significant improvements. From the shakedown live stream to the onboard videos they upload to the camera placement within the car. And I'm not talking about some other things because they're unrelated to onboard cameras, and some things have been improved recently: say, the narrow FOV nonsense almost doesn't exist now, and the dashcams are pointing fairly straight most of the time, compared to years ago where they could be pointing totally sideways and thus ruining the cornering feeling, or everything for that matter. One that is related is how they show us onboard cameras on totally boring places and on straight lines, and when a corner is coming, they cut it off. Why!? For example, watch Ogier's onboard compilation for the 2021 season they made a few years ago. It's unwatchable and largely useless. Very short clips showing nothing at all, and when something cool is about to happen, they switch it to something else. Most likely to the facecam. This is the most upsetting thing about them: why do they focus so much on the frigging and useless facecam? In that Ogier compilation it's specially ridiculous.
But also on uploaded onboard videos, they have the dashcam as the main view and the facecam is at the bottom-left in a square. Good. But then, they switch places and now the facecam is in the main view and the dashcam in the small square. Utter nonsense. Or having the cam-behind-the-seats like in Neuville's onboard with a good placement so that we can see the steering wheel, but then they put that useless facecam located behind the steering wheel right on top of the steering wheel of the main view, basically ruining the whole point of that cam-behind-the-seats. And for nothing, because the main view already has the frigging steering wheel at sight.
It's great to see the drivers at work with the facecam, to see their face expressions and shifting and handbrake inputs, but that has to be shown to us *without* compromising the driving action. I don't want to only see the driver at work, I also need to see the result of that work - the driving; the road. So they should place that thing at the bottom-right, covering the pacenotes as they are unreadable to us anyway given the video quality; and never make the facecam the main view.
And then, the bumpercams are terrible. They don't allow us to see the weight transfer of the car, the sway of the chassis, the bumps, the ruts, nothing. Since we are not seeing the car, we can't interpret how it moves in relation to the environment. All we see is a camera floating through the stage, which is a terrible thing to do to rally, as the cars are battling hard against the road. Another terrible thing is that we can't appreciate the sideways action, because a car sliding is like a compass: the tip barely moves, the pencil part is the one which does. So, the more towards the rear a camera is located, the more we can feel the sideways action. And where is the bumpercam located? Right at the front. Garbage. We also need to see the car to have a reference of how aligned it is to the road, that's why dashcams are great: they show you the dash and the bonnet, so your brain can understand the sideways angle yet still show you the road in great detail. Rally is so special in this regard, one of the few top-level motorsports where sideways is used as a technique to go fast, and they hide it away with that mediocre camera location. We can't even appreciate the scenery, because it's so low on the ground it ruins the perspective. We can't even see the sponsors!
I completely agree with what you wrote. Switching to facial expressions, I wanted to talk about this in the video, but I thought maybe some part of the audience would be interested in watching this. I'm not interested. The most important thing is the road and the pilot's reaction to the unique challenges that each stage offers. I also agree only to this facecam in place of the co-driver's notebook. It would be better if this camera were not placed at all, provided that the steering wheel, shifter and handbrake are visible in the main frame instead.
In general, I agree with your view of the situation. People write to me that I complain too much about everything. But as I see from your text, I am not the only one who thinks that people who make onboards have no idea what, how and why they do it.
Naturally, everyone has their own individual wishes; for me, for example, good image quality and telemetry display are very important. You can't please everyone, I get that. But to make so many bad decisions in this genre when you're the only one with access to such unique material is, in my opinion, unforgivable.
@@imagineracer I believe the facecam should be there in a small part of the video for these reasons: a) if placed on the door of the co-driver and pointing towards the driver, you can see how much they are pulling the handbrake, which is something you can't see from the camera behind the seats. Although this seems to be a problem at least on the GR Yaris Rally1, as in that car the handbrake seems to be pulled diagonally - that is to say, the driver pulls it not only backwards, but also towards his body. So from the perspective of the door camera, you can't see its real travel; it looks like they are barely pulling it. Still, Rally1 cars seem to have less travel in their handbrake levers compared to the WRC cars. If you don't know what camera I'm referring to, watch Tänak's onboard at Kenya 2024 on the official channel. That's the one I mean, at the bottom-left.
b) You can see on the driver's face how he gets surprised and concerned about things you would otherwise not realize just by watching the video, such as grip changes, loss of stability, hard-to-see rocks or other hazards, etc. Also on that onboard from Tänak, watch at 13:43 how he goes off the road, and how he reacts. He is quite expressive, a lot of drivers in fact. That's not a great example, because it's quite obvious what's happening there. But it's the one I can give you the timestamp of. Also watch the Ogier vs. Tänak onboard at Croatia 2023. In several places Tänak makes some facial expressions of surprise, where I couldn't tell something's wrong or tricky just by watching the steering input and car behavior.
c) It engages nice with non-enthusiasts, those who don't understand motorsport nor race driving. They see the focus in their faces (specially in people like Evans!) and the lack of blinking from them, and they get a slight notion of the concentration that's needed for rally. This makes numbers in the views count of the video, which the WRC heavily needs.
Telemetry would be nice, but to me it's more exciting to see a properly-placed pedal camera. Watch Tänak's onboard at the Power Stage of Rally Portugal 2022. That's totally exciting to me, even though the quality is garbage, the FOV of the dashcam is too narrow, and they are covering the entirety of the car, not allowing me to properly see how aligned it is to the road as I explained in my previous comment. The pedal camera could be better placed though, to properly see both pedals and how much they are pressed. In fact I believe the teams don't want the telemetry on the live feed to be precise, they want to hide stuff as usual. So I would prefer the pedal camera.
The difference is that WRC is live streaming with the cameras and they cant get much bitrate like you do in recording a video, the WRC onboard videos are just recordings of the live streams.
And the teams are not happy with putting plus 2 kilos worth of camera equipment on the car just so the WRC can have a better video quality..
The weight of the camera is already an argument. But now it is 2024. There are now modern models of small and light cameras that record video in very good quality (4k, 8k). Why can't they install one such camera specifically for recording onboards (not for online broadcasting), so that they can then publish such good, high-quality onboards from top Rally1 cars? There is no talk of 2 kilograms. Such cameras weigh 100-200 grams maximum.
Official FIA WRC onboards have shitty quality...
yea, FIA should clearly increase the quality of these rally broadcast, but there are few things to mention:
1) unfortunatly now rally is much less popular than F1. For sure the poor broadcast plays a huge role there
2) it's really really hard to translate this type of motorsport. There is no race track or smth, pure roads and forest. So even though there are 2-3 helicopters always watching cars, TV signal still be pretty bad sometimes, cuz of the connection problem.
@@verbluedSo they are already posting recordings of onboards on TH-cam. What does the difficulty of broadcasting the rally have to do with it?
@@parzivalstanza1759because the recordings they uploaded are just recorded on cameea and uploaded, not streamed. Big difference
@@verblued i agree
I totally agree. Showing rally is probably the hardest task if you take all kinds of sports. The only thing is, I don't know if they have access to sd\microsd cards from cameras. Logically, they probably do. In that case, the question remains, why are their onboards so inferior compared to amateur onboards?
"Why FIA can't use a good quality camera like any ordinary ppl with a cheap Gopro?"
THE ANSWER IS:
Because those professional cameras are built for on-the-air live coverage streamings for RallyTV
Not to record videos in 4K onto a storage device for late editing
That's simple af. No need to complain on everything.
Well, that's too bad. They have onboards section on the Rally TV website. It turns out that these are just leftovers from live broadcasts. You like the state of affairs, I don't. Okay.
@@imagineracer Most of the time quality is shit bc belive it or not, connection in forests is shit. Quality overall is not bad and they only have connection to the helicopter which then sends the data to broadcasters
Video compression, almost all live transmissions are mega poor quality especially is theres a lot of foliage
also there's speedometer on onboards
Yep, I agree when we talk about online broadcasting. We also have big problems in transmitting a direct signal during bad weather. Remember Japan last year. Online onboarding was just terrible because of this.
However, FIA have released Munster's full onboard - th-cam.com/video/lo2d1orhzoA/w-d-xo.html
This means they have access to the storage media from the cameras. So they can post a high-quality recording of the onboards after the race. But they don't.