Getting rid of the crew

I just worked on a studio show this past Friday where I'm pretty sure the director would have liked to have replaced some of the cameramen, and now it seems it's possible to replace them.....and maybe the director as well!

Dubbed the Autonomous Production of Images based on Distributed and Intelligent Sensing (APIDIS), the system combines the video stream from several cameras, says Christophe De Vleeschouwer at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), in Belgium.

Tracking a ball across various video streams is relatively easy, says De Vleeschouwer, but viewers also want to see what the players are up to. So APIDIS aims for a shot of the action that is a compromise between focusing on the ball and wider views of the pitch by tracking the ball and players simultaneously, calculating which camera captures the most detai

While this may be appealing for sports, I'm not sure if this will work so well for dramatic production. The idea of having multiple views and then having the viewer choose what they want to focus on sounds appealing, now and again, but I'm not sure most people want to spend their time choosing what they want to watch. It sounds more like a game, than an entertainment.

New Scientist: Robot film crew knows what sports fans like