You can still go and watch the parade being filmed, you just don’t get free tickets. They usually count on people with regular admission tickets to fill up the frames. The filming is for four days, the first two days you might watch the same singer lip-sinc their song four or five times and then you wait for the next person, and the second two days you just watch the same float for thirty minutes until they get every angle of it, and then it goes away, and you wait for thirty minutes for the next one to come and repeat the process. The couple of times I went I was bored, and tired of standing while they kept telling us to look happy!!!