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-   -   [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=123210)

barn34 20-02-2014 14:45

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by minhnhatbui (Post 1346967)
Agreeing on all points. Plus, missing the bandwagon for FRC reveal videos for the Premiere Night hurts teams in their struggle to visibility, especially with this high and ever-increasing number of teams.

The Premiere Night, instead of working on exclusivity to distinguish itself from the "competition", could instead have its own features, for example premiere nights by regions -- say, for example, Midwest Premiere Night, International Premiere Night, Mexican/Canadian Premiere Night, etc. -- or premiere nights by regionals/districts. That would be a huge benefit for scouting teams.

I understand what you're saying and it would be of great benefit for scouting teams. However, I put in the work to essentially sift through the videos that are released myself so my team and I can go back and watch ones for teams we will be competing with/against. Why should all that work have to fall on the guys who are doing an awesome thing for the community, which I know has to already be a ton of work as is? That may be more convenient from a scouting standpoint for the individual regional participating teams, but that's not the point of premiere night at all. On top of that, it would significantly REDUCE the visibility for the participating teams because a portion of the people who would watch the full premiere night would then only watch the premiere night for the regionals that they are attending. That seems like a huge step backwards in the effort to get more teams a little time to shine and get noticed in the sea of high profile reveal video juggernauts like 118, 148, etc.

In my oppinion, I have to agree to some extent with the limitations on 'leaks' being negative points towards teams wanting to participate. I completely understand wanting the exclusive 'first look' aspect to drive a large audience for getting everyone to see videos every team works very hard to create. People may be first tuning in for highly anticpated reveals for high profile teams, and get to see all the other hard work from teams that they may not be familiar with peppered in. It's a great system for getting more teams recognition for the amazing work they do. I would think just establishing a criteria or framework that still encourages all the awesome cross team efforts in gracious perfessionism and coopertition where certain things might get 'leaked' throughout the season would effectively fulfill all the pros and eliminate most of the cons people are pointing out. In fact, teams that do get spotlighted through news stories and other media outlets should be rewarded for those accomplishments with certain prime slots or spotlights in the premiere night line up, not punished for doing something every team should be striving to accomplish: public outreach and recognition for FIRST and their team.

Still, amazing thing you guys are doing and I fully support it. With any process, there's some iteration needed to work out some of the kinks and round off the rough edges. This is that time period for Premiere Night. Hopefully we can all help you squash the bugs in the current system and help create a yearly tradition for premiere night that grows participation and anticipation every year moving forward. :)

AdamHeard 20-02-2014 14:47

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Justin Montois (Post 1346890)
We have your submission and can't wait for Saturday night! Thanks!

As for people voicing their concerns, please continue to do so as we take everything into account as we plan for next year.

It's the rigidness that turns people off. It just seems crazy up tight for a show that is just two guys sitting at a table talking. If the production value were better it'd be more in line with the expectations you put on teams.

Libby K 20-02-2014 14:50

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Thunder910 (Post 1346973)
I kinda like this. The FiM Premiere Night, the MAR Premiere Night, the California Premiere Night, the NY Premiere Night. It'd be cool.

I do think that's a little taxing on the hosts, though - while a cool idea, they probably don't want to be broadcasting every single night from Bag Day to Week 1...

My only thing with the no-sharing rule is that 1923's robot was posted in every local newspaper for our end-of-season open house - and now our social media team can't share those articles on our own pages until they're way out of date. (Not that our robot looks the same as it did a week before bag, but there are 'complete mechanisms' shown, so we couldn't promote that.) However, our students decided they wanted to do Premiere Night, so we took that risk. We'll still post the articles after this weekend's reveal.

I've said this elsewhere - it's totally your team's choice to participate or not. If you feel like you've come up with something groundbreaking that you think will help the FIRST community, then share it. If you want to reveal your robot, but not on Premiere Night, go for it. There's no reason you can't make your own reveal video and post it on Chief, like so many teams have done for years (118, 148, 610, 11 - all of those are on my front page of Chief right now.) If you don't want to share at all, then do that! What a team does is their own business and their own choice.

I love the idea of feedback and live commentary during Premiere Night, and I'll be tuning in to watch what everyone thinks of the other robots (as well as ours). It's the reason we chose to share (or not) the way we did. Will 1923 do it next year if there are sharing restrictions? We'll see - depends on what the students choose to do and what we come up with.

minhnhatbui 20-02-2014 15:03

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by barn34 (Post 1346985)
I understand what you're saying, it would be of great benefit for scouting, but that's why our team puts in the work to essentially sift through the videos that are released ourselves. Why should all that work have to fall on these guys who are doing an awesome thing for the community, which I know has to already be a ton of work as is, just so it's more convenient for the individual regional participating teams? That seems like a very selfish request. On top of that, that would significantly REDUCE the visibility for the participating teams because a portion of the people who would watch the full premiere night would then only watch the premiere night for the regionals that they are attending. That seems like a huge step backwards in the effort to get more teams a little time to shine and get noticed in the sea of high profile reveal video juggernauts like 118, 148, etc.

In my oppinion, I have to agree to some extent with the limitations on 'leaks' being a negative points towards teams wanting to participate. I completely understand wanting the exclusive 'first look' aspect to drive a large audience for getting everyone to see videos every team works very hard to create while they may be first tuning in for highly anticpated reveals for high profile teams. I would think just establishing a criteria or framework that still encourages all the awesome cross team efforts in gracious perfessionism and coopertition where certain things might get 'leaked' throughout the season would effectively fulfill all the pros and eliminate most of the cons people are pointing out.

Still, amazing thing you guys are doing and I fully support it. With any process, there's some iteration needed to work out some of the kinks and round off the rough edges. This is that time period for Premiere Night. Hopefully we can all help you squash the bugs in the current system and help create a yearly tradition for premiere night that grows participation and anticipation every year moving forward. :)

I'm sorry if I appear to suggest "shifting" work from students to guys like Mike and Justin, who by the way are doing a great work for the FRC community in creating a show about robots. My point was that wanting exclusivity on videos might go towards their interest, but is conflicting with some teams' interests, including mine -- interests such as cooperation, jumping sooner in the bandwagon, etc.

I was suggesting multiple premiere nights for two reasons:

1) Reduce a single 4-6 hours show that would be hard to watch in its entirety;
2) Have a premiere night each week so that it increases the hype before each event;

It would create a hype for each event. Good scouting teams will not limit themselves in watching robots attending their events.

I don't think this formula would reduce visibility for Mike and Justin; on the contrary, each week, people would be expecting a preview show à la ESPN, done by Mike and Justin, with more time and added narrative for each team. IMHO, it would really give FIRST an image of a varsity program if there is such show with added narrative, history and interview for each team. Mike and Justin could fill that hole.

Andrew Schreiber 20-02-2014 15:12

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by minhnhatbui (Post 1346998)
I'm sorry if I appear to suggest "shifting" work from students to guys like Mike and Justin, who by the way are doing a great work for the FRC community in creating a show about robots. My point was that wanting exclusivity on videos might go towards their interest, but is conflicting with some teams' interests, including mine -- interests such as cooperation, jumping sooner in the bandwagon, etc.

I was suggesting multiple premiere nights for two reasons:

1) Reduce a single 4-6 hours show that would be hard to watch in its entirety;
2) Have a premiere night each week so that it increases the hype before each event;

It would create a hype for each event. Good scouting teams will not limit themselves in watching robots attending their events.

I don't think this formula would reduce visibility for Mike and Justin; on the contrary, each week, people would be expecting a preview show à la ESPN, done by Mike and Justin, with more time and added narrative for each team. IMHO, it would really give FIRST an image of a varsity program if there is such show with added narrative, history and interview for each team. Mike and Justin could fill that hole.

Having actually done a preview show weekly during competition season, it's absolutely brutal. Add into that never having a [day] to yourself for 2 months also starts to take a toll when you work a full time job too.


Doing the whole thing at once is far less brutal on the hosts as you get it done and can recover. Even that is rough though - Our EWCP CMP preview casts take a toll on us every year. I don't think most people take into considering how hard it is to keep conversation flowing, avoid dead air, stay on target, monitor chat, and ensure that the stream is going out. It's a lot to keep track of.

Libby K 20-02-2014 15:29

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by minhnhatbui (Post 1346998)
I was suggesting multiple premiere nights for two reasons:

1) Reduce a single 4-6 hours show that would be hard to watch in its entirety;
2) Have a premiere night each week so that it increases the hype before each event;

The thing about this is, they already do a show every week during the season... so you'd want them to do two show nights?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber (Post 1347004)
Having actually done a preview show weekly during competition season, it's absolutely brutal. Add into that never having a [day] to yourself for 2 months also starts to take a toll when you work a full time job too.

^^ This. The burnout would be pretty intense for them. I think one Premiere Night is plenty.

minhnhatbui 20-02-2014 15:39

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Libby K (Post 1347024)
The thing about this is, they already do a show every week during the season... so you'd want them to do two show nights?

Multiple premiere nights by regionals/districts was just a suggestion to "sensationalize" FIRST, not a request. I do understand the burden and the toll: I am myself in that situation with two jobs at 30-40 hours/week, university at 20 hours/week and mentoring at 20-30 hours/week. We all live in the same, harsh reality that is FIRST.

barn34 20-02-2014 15:40

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
In my oppinion, the weekly blog posts by certain individuals highlighting each week's competitions with predictions and little tidbits about the game trends and strategies is fine for event anticipation. Doing a video version of that would be exponentially tougher, I'm sure. Would it be cool? Of course. Worth the work to make it and do it week after week throughout competition season? Not so sure. Guess that depends on who would be contributing and how a work load would be destributed. Definitely don't think we, as a community, are at that point right now. I could be wrong though...

Libby K 20-02-2014 15:41

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by minhnhatbui (Post 1347031)
Multiple premiere nights by regionals/districts was just a suggestion to "sensationalize" FIRST, not a request. I do understand the burden and the toll: I am myself in that situation with two jobs at 30-40 hours/week, university at 20 hours/week and mentoring at 20 hours/week. We all live in the same, harsh reality that is FIRST.

Very true. I think that's a nice way to 'make it loud', but perhaps that would then be on each team/the regional or district committee to hype their event up, rather than on two guys who are already very busy providing something the FIRST community enjoys. :)

AllenGregoryIV 20-02-2014 15:55

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
I have a new point to make about this. I understand not wanting people to post their reveal videos, that makes sense. But posting anything else seems reasonable. We posted video of our mecanum wheel collector on February 3rd, most of the comments on our reveal video thread were about how they had never seen a team do that. We get about 150-200 views a day on our blog, premier night pulls in a much larger audience than that.

Even if people have posted videos/photos/detailed design descriptions. Most of FRC is too busy building their own robots to care. The exclusivity doesn't really make that much of a difference. A lot of people still won't look at other teams' robots till after build season.

Chris is me 20-02-2014 16:04

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Libby K (Post 1346990)
I've said this elsewhere - it's totally your team's choice to participate or not. If you feel like you've come up with something groundbreaking that you think will help the FIRST community, then share it. If you want to reveal your robot, but not on Premiere Night, go for it. There's no reason you can't make your own reveal video and post it on Chief, like so many teams have done for years (118, 148, 610, 11 - all of those are on my front page of Chief right now.) If you don't want to share at all, then do that! What a team does is their own business and their own choice.

The difficulty here, and what I've been saying since the first post of this thread, is that decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Making something optional doesn't automatically mean its net effect on the greater community is neutral, and "it's optional!" can't be a universal defense.

What Premiere Night does is creates an incentive for middle of the pack teams to distinguish themselves from others, and the price of admission is secrecy. There are teams who would share if they could but value the publicity more. Dozens of them. The unintended consequences of this are that less information is shared in public in general. Maybe that's a small part of why we see so many Ri3D clones?

---

Responding to Justin's request for continued feedback, here are our experiences:

At first, our team was excited to participate in Reveal Night. We attribute a lot of our relative notoriety to our participation in it last year and the team loved the idea of showing off our robot with a flashy video. As the weeks have gone on, we've had to keep reminding kids, our social media team, and adults not to share robot photos publicly. By the end of build season, almost all of the team has grown fed up with the restrictions and thinks that releasing an independent reveal video on our own terms would have been a better option.

We are still planning to participate, but that's mainly because the 90-second video won't be done until a few hours before the deadline anyway and we've already sunk the cost of secrecy - it would be dumb to give up participating now. Without a rule change, however, we will not be participating in this event again.

(By the way, as an aside, another frustrating thing about the competition has been the ever changing rule details combined with the seriousness. At first, no complete mechanism could be posted. Then, frames could be posted as long as it wasn't your whole drivetrain. Later on, a post said that completed drivetrains were actually okay to post all along - I can't find any post prior to this one saying that. If you're going to have strict rules, at least define them well and stick to them.)

Mike Starke 21-02-2014 09:31

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Hey everyone! A little less than 12 hours left to get your videos in! Head on over to FRCTop25.com to submit!
We will release a list of teams participating tomorrow morning!

Let us know if you have any questions, and we'll see you tomorrow night!!

joelg236 22-02-2014 00:03

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Mike Starke (Post 1347427)
Hey everyone! A little less than 12 hours left to get your videos in! Head on over to FRCTop25.com to submit!
We will release a list of teams participating tomorrow morning!

Let us know if you have any questions, and we'll see you tomorrow night!!

Can't wait to see who'll be there. I'm excited to see teams like 33 and 1986 (hopefully!), but I feel like this game opens up the competition to any team with a clever design.

M. Lillis 22-02-2014 00:24

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
177 was going to submit, but our schedule didn't allow for it this year.

TikiTech 22-02-2014 02:45

Re: [FRCTop25.com]- 2014 Premiere Night
 
Howzit!

We had some reservations at first but decided that it is well worth it. For a small team like us, it is a chance at greater exposure. We are very proud of our robot and were able to show some "teasers" on CD and still, I believe, qualify for this event. There are some new additions that were added to the robot just before bagging that video was not available to our media team to make part of our reveal. This gives us some surprises left to share later on, or for you to discover at the regional we are competing at.

I cannot wait to see all the great robot reveal videos...

Good luck to everyone!!

Aloha..


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