24HR LIVE

[Pete Sparrow]

Apologies if loads of people have already said this already but I just wanted to say thank you to Chris and Martin and everyone else involved with the Live feed and commentary at the 24hr race this year. Most of my immeadiate family couldn't be there but having their laptops on in the house and keeping up with what was going on was just like being there (but with out the wet/heat/achey limbs/clearing up and hangover) plus it gave them away to be involved by sending messages and 'in' jokes which made us chuckle. Messages from Singapore, Austrailia and Hereford being some of the far away places that contacted the teams during the races, that is proper cool. This has added yet another fantastic angle to a legendary event and I'm very proud of everyone involved.
Thanks again.
Pete 'Bitch' Sparrow. ;D

[Chris Yates]

Many thanks Pete! It was a bit of a slog this year - lots of things didn't work out the way we planned, and other things took much longer to set up than I thought. I was disappointed that we didn't get some of the extra camera angles set up, but I lost sight of the fact that the end result was still very good! We got lots of good reports from people watching on the web, and there were viewers in just about every corner of the world. It was great for those who couldn't make it in person.

We've learned valuable lessons for next time as well, and I fully intend to do it bigger and better next year!

[Rambo]

 Do you get any indications as to how many viewers you had round the world? Personally I got messages from France, Denmark, Holland and New Zealand commenting on the high quality of the coverage. Graham.

[Chris Yates]

Hi Graham,

Early indications are that over 1,600 people watched the coverage over the weekend! I've still to check the stats properly to see where they all came from, but that's a fairly impressive figure already!

[David Bain]

That interim figure is excellent and must indicate the advertising potential for the future. I don't know the technicalities of the setup and do realise that full TV style coverage is the realm of fantasy. I therefore hope I'm being constructive when I say that, for me, the only downer in the online coverage was that often, when something interesting was happening in the pit lane we'd be switched away to see cars circulating. Is the output directed or is it simply engineered? Maybe I'm biased in being one of the dirty fingernails set rather than a cool driver dude!

[Chris Yates]

Hi David,

The output this year was directed, but a few technical problems (i.e. stuff not working as it was supposed to) meant that the pitlane camera that was supposed to show you what was happening in the pits was either not working at all, or with limited range. This was fixed subsequently later in the race, and the pitlane camera was able to give some pretty good shots of driver changes in the pitlane, as well as some views from the exit of Coram, entry of Russell.

There was a human element as well, in that the camera operator did not always listen to the commentary to work out what he should be pointing his camera at

As I say, some lessons were learned!

But you're right - one of the things I really wanted to see was the video from the pit lane, to see the cars being worked on, and drivers being changed. It's a rather large element of a 24 hour race.