What technology can be used to improve the pinball viewing experience for the casual observer?

This is not viable due to the amount of equipment that would be involved. The only way to do this would be to interrupt the A final to have other divisions’ finals on the same machines. This was tried at some early Pinburgh (2012 or 2013) and was generally seen as a negative, because other divisions’ finalists had to adjust to new machines, and the A finalists had to wait for an entire round to play and complete.

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For what it’s worth, this is already being done for PAPA broadcasts, with the booth commentators selected for specific roles.

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A crawl along the bottom of the screen with the current point status for all groups in finals, or the current status of the top X players in qualifying would be a great solution for the onscreen scoreboard issue. Has anyone tried this yet?

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The golf flyover is a great idea.

It would also be great to show a static bio page for each player when a new player is introduced. This page would have the players name and photo with a list of basic info and stats such as age, hometown, major tournament wins, ranking, etc.

I always get sucked into sports when I make a personal connection with the players.

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G$ is dead on the money. I was thinking that someone/PAPA could make a ton of these so that they’re prepared for any game that might come up (and can make new ones if not). If I had access to professional editing, I’d try to make a ton of these; it’s a lot easier to explain the strategies than research the rules. :stuck_out_tongue:

Honestly as a player I wouldn’t want that. Seeing all the internet idiocy over the Bowen/ Escher Yahoo article further cements that.

Ehh, its Yahoo. From what I saw on Kotaku, the comments section was actually pretty good on Kotaku’s article.

Also, http://horribleyahoonewscomments.tumblr.com/

So, kinda like this from the 2016 Pin-Masters & any other major tournament broadcast I’ve done since INDISC 2016 :slight_smile:, although I’ve reduced the amount of information used since Pin-Masters. This has also been available to any major tournament using DTM with profile photos as seen at Pinvasion / TPF / Buffalo Summer Open / More…

I have to show off Instant Replay too since I think it’s so freaking cool and such a benefit to highlight great moments.

I tried this a while back and abandoned it when I couldn’t get a nice, smooth scroll. It was always choppy. Maybe I’ll have to re-visit it, or do it a different way. I’ve always wanted to highlight scores as they came in with a notification on the bottom of the screen, such as “Player X has taken the 1st place spot on Funhouse with 30,001,300”.

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Maybe be instead of crawling, a quick crossfade between blocks of info would be less taxing on the system?

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nice instant replay of our new world champion, where is yours from WoF? I couldn’t find video archives?

In video editing hell. Having problems with the source files & Premiere but I do have lower quality backups ready just in case.

oh my goodness it’s brutal :frowning:

But let’s be honest, a 13 year old kid should really be preparing for a career as a high powered executive/lawyer/surgeon, not wasting time being a non deaf, non dumb and non blind pinball wizard. :astonished:

  1. An example of gameplay rules and tips is here: https://youtu.be/Ff3gl0-rjw4?list=PLrEA2l5-0WRK-ofEctv0cmefMA10xOywG
    – just cut it down to 20 sec or so. However, producing these with actual play isn’t easy or fast, so make them with animated arrows, circles, and summary rules on a static overhead picture. Even this simplistic style takes about an hour to produce, so you’re asking someone (Bowen) to spend 20 hours or so in prep work before the tourney.
  2. ever watch the International Dota2 online? And you thought pinball was confusing! You need a teenager next to you describing what you’re watching…
  3. crawling or animated text is a no-no for streaming due to compression artifacts.
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For those, like me, who hadn’t seen this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/13-year-old-new-pinball-world-champion-201554864.html

It isn’t the worst article I’ve ever read. I kinda feared they were going to set up a fake rivalry with bad blood between Escher and Bowen.

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Not only that, whoever does this has to not be a tournament participant, because that person would be privy to the game selections, and because it would look very strange for the person doing so to then compete in the same game.

Agree on #3 completely, text crawl is out.

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I don’t know if I would trade the lack of sponsor patches on competitors clothing for high tech espn graphics and play by play.

I know it can be difficult for a non-player to follow but how many other sports have current competitors as commentators?

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Those are both awesome. :sunglasses:

Something else that as a viewer I would love is a “highlight reel” of each event’s stream, showing the big game-changing shots, saves, and general player awesomeness, funny antics, highs and lows, etc. It would be a nice thing to have for posterity. If I don’t have time to watch the stream unfold in real-time, it would be great fun to watch the highlight reel later at my leisure.

I realize producing something like this would be serious editing work, but hey, this is the internet people, somebody make it happen! :grinning:

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I don’t want to say that PAPA or IEPinball or any other people who have been able to broadcast pinball have done a poor job. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. All channels have done an incredible job on a fraction of the budget that any sort of professional production companies might have. I think the response to the Kotaku article in large part comes from the frustrations about the fact that it’s even more frustrating to be doing the work or watching PAPA and others bust their a**es for 400 live viewers max during a stream.

I think it’s almost to the point where pinball video production needs to be spun off into its own thing, either under the umbrella of PAPA or independently contracting for PAPA events and circuit events. The PAPA staff has done a hugely incredible job with ReplayFX and the Circuit and PAPA since 2004. All of those events have been absolutely state-of-the-art. They are absolutely the best people for running world-class pinball events. I don’t want this criticism to reflect on the current PAPA staff at all since I think they are doing the best.

From my personal experience with streaming pinball over the past few months and what I’ve learned the most critical thing I’m missing is time. I would need to be able to stream and produce video as a full-time thing in order to grow my own channel to where I want it to be. Twitch and Youtube and other sites don’t operate like television unfortunately and they demand an almost-constant work schedule to keep your page rankings, search rankings, and placement up. With working full time I’m only able to stream once and maybe twice a week. Any inconsistency hurts my channel. Twitch guidelines want you streaming 3 times per week and maintaining an average concurrent viewership of 500+ during all the times you are streaming as a general guidelines for partnership. This is what’s required of teenagers in order to make some pocket change! Can you imagine PAPA streaming that often?

There are other avenues too such as going for television contracts. These things require knowledge and experience as well as massive time and $$ investments. They also potentially lead to a loss of control over the format of an event. Since there are currently no professional pinball players either there is also a problem coming from how you would even be able to produce something for TV like the WSOP without eating into everyone’s very busy lives.

And I guess on a closing thought, there is this key word “professional” in the PAPA acronym. Although it’s not stated anywhere in the mission statement that PAPA is responsible for sanctioning any sort of pinball professionals and it has no membership, it certainly was confusing for me for a while and probably to the Kotaku writer just seeing the world “Professional” associated with the event. My initial thoughts were “well I guess these A players must be sponsored if they’re professionals” when I first wandered into PAPA 16 almost completely by accident.

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I was thinking PAPA’s next facility could be called ReplayFX Center and pinball would just be apart of it. The other events could help keep the center open year round , create more cash flow and leverage the video setup for a better ROI. They can also cross market to put more eyes on pinball.

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