FIA Formula E World Championship has enhanced its onboard cameras for each race to give viewers even more angles in ever-higher resolution for 2025-2026.
For season 12, while Formula E has around 10 onboard cameras on every car in each race, this year the quality has been increased with more vehicles able to transmit, and more in UHD.
Since season nine, Formula E has been able to send live feeds back from 12 of the 22 cars on the track at any one time, with the others recording onboard to download later and use for replay opportunities in post production, using a system developed by Timeline TV with technology from Domo Broadcast Systems.
In the run-up to this season, Formula E has run an internal programme called ‘All Cars Live’, which does exactly what it says on the tin – all cars will have their onboard cameras transmitting live for the entire race. It is a programme that has been running with Timeline TV using technology from Domo Broadcast Systems, in conjunction with Gravity Media.
All 22 cars on the circuit are now live and transmitting, with eight at any one time transmitting four angles in UHD – a limited number of cars only due to bandwidth constraints – and the rest transmitting one angle in HD. Those eight chosen cars transmitting in UHD can be switched on the fly to other vehicles, according to how the story is moving.
Hamish Harris, Formula E’s broadcast and media technology director, explains how it is working: “There’s eight cars that we can choose to be UHD, so we’ll transmit four angles off the car at once, which gives production quite a bit of flexibility in terms of how that works. Then there’s another 14 receivers, so we can get the other 12 cars on the track, plus we can have the safety cars as well, coming back [in HD]. All of the cameras are basically received over the network back to London.”
Formula E works on its production with host broadcast production partner, Aurora, as well as its technical services provider Gravity Media, alongside partners for its onboard cameras Timeline TV and Domo Broadcast Systems, and Tata Communications, its broadcast distribution partner.
Teamwork workflow
The original camera system was developed by Timeline TV and Domo for season nine, and updated when the series went to the Gen3 Evo cars for the 2024-2025 season. This season 12, those camera units from Domo were modified for the All Cars Live system. Next season – 2026-2027 – Formula E moves to the new Gen4 Evo vehicles, and modifications to the onboard camera system will be informed by knowledge gained in this 2025-2026 season’s learnings from the All Cars Live evolution.
“The first eight of those feeds, we’ve got flexibility to change any of the other three angles in that UHD quad to be what we want them to be,” says Flay. “They can be a mirror shot looking at the driver for a reaction if they win going over the line, they can be the plank underneath the nose, the driver’s eye in the helmet itself. We can chop and change those on demand relevant to the subject matter that we’re covering”
Aurora’s technical director, Lee Flay, says: “We can select which cars are transmitting in UHD and which ones are transmitting in a standard HD output. So one angle off 12 cars, four angles off eight cars, but they’re all UHD-capable, and they’ve all got the ability to switch around.”
It is a team effort to get the feeds from all the onboards in use back to London, says Harris: “We’ve got eight cars transmitting in UHD and then the other 14 cars in HD. We receive them on site in Timeline TV’s pod. Timeline then QC’s them and makes sure they’re all operating correctly, and they do all the control of the car cameras. They hand those feeds to Al Kamel, our graphics partner.
“We then stream those feeds out to the teams and to the FIA. At the same time, the receivers are sending transport streams back to Westworks in London to Gravity, where we’ve got another duplicate set of decoders and then they go through a big shuffle – we’re then decoding them, QC’ing and enhancing the audio very slightly – and then they get presented to the onboard director.”
Continues Harris: “And then from Westworks, we’re also streaming them up to our media asset management system, and we’re streaming them to the teams’ factories as well, so that the staff operating back at the factory have got live streams of the cars as well.”
Subcut frenzy
In total there are 44 live angles available at any one time for the production. These come from eight cars transmitting in UHD each with four angles, creating 32 angles in total, plus angles from the remaining 12 cars, all of which have a single HD angle each bring the final total to 44 angles.
Narrowing those 44 angles down to what is needed in the moment for the live cut, Mike Scott, Aurora’s executive producer on site at track, decides what the story is and reads the race. The onboard producer, who is based in Westworks, follows Scott’s story line and selects the appropriate onboard angles to present to Westbury Gillet, who is executive director at Westworks. Gillet gets 12 angles presented to him, distilled down from the 44 live angles available. The onboard producer also steers Timeline in selecting what populates the 44 live angles available to them from the cars on the track; with 10 angles per car the onboard producer has 200 angles to choose from.
Flay explains why it is necessary to trim down the available number of onboard camera angles for the international director: “If you imagine, we’ve got in excess of 200 available camera angles off the cars alone that are available to the producer in London. They can call up any of those angles to be available to them live on the eight cars that we get in UHD. Output One is always the T-piece above the driver’s head looking forward, and that matches all the HD signals as well, so for 20 cars on the grid, you will always have a T-piece camera looking forward by default available to the teams and to the FIA.
“The first eight of those feeds, we’ve got flexibility to change any of the other three angles in that UHD quad to be what we want them to be,” says Flay. “They can be a mirror shot looking at the driver for a reaction if they win going over the line, they can be the plank underneath the nose, the driver’s eye in the helmet itself. We can chop and change those on demand relevant to the subject matter that we’re covering. If you’ve got a car on pole position that goes off the line first, the camera looking ahead is showing empty track and you want to be showing the camera from the rear, showing the cars chasing him and battling for position.
“We’re changing those angles all the time to give the best coverage, and that onboard producer then is selecting what cars we are viewing in quad mode – so what cars we’re seeing multiple angles from – and then selecting the angles within those quads,” adds Flay. “So we’ve got full flexibility of coverage.”
Flay continues that while more is mostly great, potentially it could become overwhelming for the production team: “If we had the RF bandwidth available to us, we’d have more cars with multiple angles, but you just end up running out of either bandwidth to get all those angles back to London, or RF restrictions on site for getting them off the cars because you need so much bandwidth to get all those cars in UHD all the time.
“You also end up with a limitation because the onboard producer would then have in excess of 480 cameras available to them, which just gets ridiculous; nobody can cut that down and manage that all at once. He sits in between the story and the international director, feeding him enough that he can tell the story live with 12 camera angles within the gallery; that’s as much as they can process in a live race, as drama-filled as ours normally are, he just hasn’t got time.”
At the end of the session, the onboard team takes the SD cards off 20 cars, which are then ingested into the media asset management system, to be available for archive and post production.
AI slowmo cameras
Formula E is also working with artificial intelligence (AI) slowmo this year. It is using EVS’ XtraMotion for generative AI replay effects.
Explains Harris: “We’re using EVS XtraMotion, which has actually been another good thing for us this year. We’ve got an XtraMotion engine that’s running at Westworks.
“What we used to do in the past is of our 24 line cameras, two of them were four-speed super slow. We’d send the live output of the camera back and, we’d send the four phases of each camera back, co-timed, and that’s what we’d use for replays.
“Now, we’ve got XtraMotion doing that for us,” Harris continues. “We’re not using any of the cameras that are actually super slow. Instead, we send all camera feeds back and now anything can be super slow, basically; XtraMotion will slow them down to three-speed and run a deblur across them. It gives the production team another set of tools that they can use where they’re not just locked down to having to make the decision of where they want to put these two specific cameras; they can use anything really. You can have super slow onboards if you want to.”
Flay adds that the Aurora team has done just that, making some onboard cameras into super slomo cameras using XtraMotion. He says: “We’ve used the onboard camera systems and run them through the same EVS system and they’ve come out with super smooth, slowmo replays of incidents from the onboard cameras. So every camera is now a super slow-enabled camera, so it really has changed what we can do. It’s a wonderful tool.”
Additionally, XtraMotion has helped Formula E’s move this year to 1080p SDR in terms of bandwidth.
Harris says: “We’re in 1080p SDR this year across the board. So now being able to save the bandwidth of not having to send those [slowmo camera] phases back, whilst having every camera in 1080p has helped us a lot with having to manage our bandwidth. We’ve got an extra couple of gig from Tata. Our delivery to site is an internet-based delivery for the last mile to site. So we’ve got two five gig circuits that get to site and then go onto Tata’s media network from their nearest point of presence to the track. So trying to save that bandwidth whilst going to 1080p has helped us quite a bit.”
