The Future of F1 Minute Video
Last week, for a period of five days, F1 Minute trialled a new service dubbed F1 Minute Video. The idea was to look into ways of building upon the current daily audio show format and to judge audience reaction.
The feedback received was overwhelmingly positive. Whether from comments here, or on other sites, it looks like the concept translated well. We had originally envisaged running the trial for more than a week, but we’ve halted the project temporarily in order to improve a number of areas.
Upscaling
The production workflow was always envisaged to be a high definition workflow. Original footage is filmed in HD, and the graphics are created for HD resolutions. Sadly high definition Formula 1 footage is few and far between at the moment, and upscaling existing SD footage is both time consuming and imperfect. We’re actively looking into solving this issue though and there will be more trials relating to this in the future.
Formatting
F1 Minute isn’t necessarily tied to a daily format, it was just the most obvious step up from the current daily format to investigate. We’re keen to see what else might work, and how we might handle events during the course of a race weekend. At the moment, the audio show runs five days a week during the off season, and seven days a week when races occur. That’s a lot of video editing to consider, when there’s only two people working on the project.
Sponsoring
The production time involved in creating the daily video was greater than we estimated. There are many ways to reduce the amount of work involved, some to the detriment of the project and some not so. Primarily though, if we want to ensure the show remains some form of regularity it will require additional financial input that we don’t yet have. Traditionally there are a number of solutions to this problem, from offering a subscription package to finding some form of show sponsorship. As far as we’re aware, there are no other services like this online or offline, and currently the content is produced to a broadcast standard. Whether or not there is enough demand for such a service is open to question.
This post was intended as a means of keeping everybody in the loop, and offer a chance to say thank you to everyone who took an interest in the first video trial. We’ve already learnt a lot, and we’ll need to learn a lot more, so we intend there to be more trials before the start of the 2010 season, albeit perhaps in a more ad-hoc fashion.
We’ll keep you posted.
