![\"Featuring](\"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/DroneRaces.png\")
<\/a>Featuring complicated courses in a variety of venues, drone-race competitions will be postprocessed into hour-long packages.<\/p><\/div>\n
Airing as 10 one-hour episodes, the 2016 DRL season covers five races, including a winner-take-all world championship to crown the best drone pilot. DRL will also partner with MGM Television to develop unscripted shows, executive-produced by reality producer Mark Burnett, exploring the world of DRL, its pilots, and technology, allowing existing fans to get a deeper look at the league while bringing new fans to the sport.<\/p>\n
Starting next month, the broadcasts<\/a> will air on ESPN\/ESPN2 and will feature 25 of the fastest FPV pilots from more than eight countries competing for a professional contract in the 2017 season and the title \u201cWorld\u2019s Greatest Drone Pilot.\u201d<\/p>\n Small and Fast The courses are set up in a variety of locations; drone racing may be years away from its own arenas. These include an abandoned mill in Los Angeles, a former paper factory in Ohio, a closed Cadillac metal-stamping plant in Detroit; and the former Bell Labs office building outside New York City. The first race, \u201cMiami Lights,\u201d from Sun Life Stadium, will be shown Sunday Oct. 23 at 10 a.m. on ESPN2.<\/p>\n Horbaczewski says issues around this peripatetic venue journey include finding sufficient power sources onsite for what is a substantial amount of kit for the races. Generators and other heavy equipment are being sourced by Hertz Equipment Rentals. Location production is done by several remote-production companies, all with their own substantial sports-broadcast bona fides, including Kodiak, NEP, and Lyon Video. As many as 50 cameras are used on the races. These include numerous GoPro cams fitted on the drones themselves and along the course and the same Spidercam<\/a> and Cablecam<\/a> platforms used at NFL games. Two Red Dragon<\/a> high-speed cameras are also used to create slo-mo shots in postproduction.<\/p>\n Shotgun microphones are laid out around the courses. A field reporter uses a handheld microphone and is followed by handheld video cameras during visits to the pilots\u2019 area, where the drone jockeys fly as many as six aircraft through wireless video connections through three-dimensional obstacle courses.<\/p>\n Postproduction Aside from the difficulty in maintaining a visual narrative of such small and fast objects \u2014 \u201cThe amount of video switching you\u2019d have to do would be enormous to show this live,\u201d Horbaczewski says \u2014 drone racing has perceptual expectations to overcome. He notes that market research revealed that many potential viewers expected to see something similar to podracing<\/a>, a \u201csport\u201d they first encountered in Star Wars<\/em>: Episode I The Phantom Menace<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was all CG, and it cost millions of dollars to produce,\u201d Horbaczewski points out. \u201cThat\u2019s the perceptual bar we had to meet. But it did help us shape our ideas for bringing this to television and determining what equipment we\u2019d need to make it compelling viewing.\u201d<\/p>\n Commentary will be added as voiceover in post, along with comments from pilots recorded before, during, and after the races. Audiences, protected by netting, will be brought into each venue, with crowd-reaction sound captured by microphones along the audience areas. Sound will play a big part in the DRL broadcasts, according to Horbaczewski, with the drones\u2019 own modified engines adding more \u201croar\u201d than the buzz that usually accompanies drones.<\/p>\n \u201cYou get a lot of information about the direction and speed of the drones from their sound,\u201d he explains, adding that audio will be available in stereo and 5.1 surround. \u201cIn that way, it\u2019s very similar to F1 and NASCAR, except that a drone can change direction and speed in an instant; there are no curves on these courses. We\u2019ve invested a lot in sound capture for the races. It\u2019s like nothing you\u2019ve ever seen or heard before. Ever.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. All six of them. Drone racing takes off in October and may mark another inflection point in the evolution of broadcast sports as virtual […]\n More<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":105396,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9248,33],"tags":[10232,10231,131],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105395"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105395"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105415,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105395\/revisions\/105415"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsvideo.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/strong>DRL founder\/CEO Nicholas Horbaczewski describes the challenges of getting a new sport on the air \u2014 literally. \u201cIt took over a year to figure out the best way to do drone racing as a television sport,\u201d he says, crediting DRL Head of Media Tony Budding with much of the strategy. \u201cYou\u2019re talking about capturing something the size of a dinner plate going 80 miles per hour over a complicated course. It\u2019s never been done before.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>However, unlike most broadcast sports, DRL races won\u2019t be shown live, nor will they be streamed. Instead, the footage will be postproduced and edited into one- and two-hour race packages for broadcast.<\/p>\n