ITTF video quality ? Is there a reason ?

TTW

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Hi all Table tennis fans,
I love watching TT matches and their is something that I question everytime I see ITTF uploaded replays. They upload them in really bad quality and people often write that in the youtube comments section.
I don't really understand why they upload such a bad quality of replay videos, is there a reason ?
Do they read comments or is there a way we can send them an email or a petition sort of something so that they start uploading better quality videos.

I am sure they have good quality camera and if you see live matches on ITTF website, it is good. So then why youtube ?
 
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Yeah. It upsets me too. Particularly when you see the ball in 2 separated places each shot and that’s it. My brain cannot deduce spin and speed from that much information.
The T2 and the World Cup were really good. 1080p 50Hz. Perfect.
They probably don’t have enough modern digital high speed cameras to cover and also thinking about bringing a team like that everywhere in the world.

Fast & Furious 9 certainly has more money and it’s only 24p.
 
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I just watched Timo Boll vs FZD and was just about to make a similar thread.

As this match is obviously casted on TV and with good cameras (you can see the different angles etc). I think the video uploaded on youtube is just ripped from the ITTF stream instead of actually getting the source footage in good quality and then editing that. If you go watch the ITTF video on their website you can see it's also quite bad quality.

It's sad to see that they choose to do this instead of waiting a bit longer, getting source footage and then editing that.

All sports but specially sports as fast as table tennis highly depend on high amount of FPS in the video/stream to get good quality in them. Even more than high resolution in my opinion (720 is enough but of course 4k is better).
 
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Beyond video cameras and editing hardware, there might also be an issue with the actual lights of the venue. I'm guessing the boll/fzd match was on table 1, which is usually the best positioned one, which might contribute to the video quality being better. I'm sure we've all played in venues with poor lightning to the point where playing wasn't easy, I can't imagine how complex recording must be.

I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here, but I wouldn't be surprised if ITTF wasn't entirely responsible for what they upload.
 
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This is not about lights etc. Just look at this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDlVZak2NRc

The video is pixelated all the time, which is because of low bitrate. The FPS is hacky so it's meant to be 50fps but the frames just aren't there to provide 50fps.

And this is probably the most popular match of the whole tournament, the best european player in their home country playing against FZD, the top candidate for the olympics probably.

Imagine this quality in an el classico, people would go mad. Barcelona vs Real Madrid without being able to see anything clearly.

This makes it a bad experience to follow table tennis online and it really is to bad that this is the case in 2020.
 
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Where did you get that footage from? Would be great to see the matches from that source ^^
 
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There is nothing to do with the lighting. I do photography so I know this sort of stuff a little bit. If the light is not enough for 60fps, you are in an English pub for the dinner.

You can look at the photographs too. They are taken at much higher speed (to freeze the motion completely), much zoomed in (giving you less “light” as such). And they really clean :)
 
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I have 10 year old video recorders I don't use anymore, they cost about $100 new, do 720P and have enough zoom to frame the table properly. I got them to record my personal matches, consumer stuff, not pro level. So no, this is just lame or lazy or both.
 
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If ITTF's free stream was full hd/50p who'd pay for Eurosport/Kayo Sports/etc ... ITTF would never willingly lose that stream of revenue.
My man, the streams ARE much higher quality, it is only the youtube video that is this bad. Maybe they're not perfect but a LOT better PQ and FPS than YT replays
 
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I think it's just a question of time it takes. On one of Dan (TTD) vlog, we saw that it was just laptop that were streaming the video. Then editing might be quicker with lighter files. Finally uploading 40 videos per Open might take long on good quality as they maybe can only upload one at a time ?

Not an expert here, and indeed just some hardware investment could solve a lot of this (?)
 
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TTW

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Yeah. It upsets me too. Particularly when you see the ball in 2 separated places each shot and that’s it. My brain cannot deduce spin and speed from that much information.
The T2 and the World Cup were really good. 1080p 50Hz. Perfect.
They probably don’t have enough modern digital high speed cameras to cover and also thinking about bringing a team like that everywhere in the world.

Fast & Furious 9 certainly has more money and it’s only 24p.
They have high quality camera because their live steam on ITTF.com is certainly HQ.
 
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