Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike AA
Hi guys,
I run firstvideoarchive.com. I have been recording/archiving FIRST robotics videos since before soap and before the bluealliance. The biggest setback each year, someone else said it already and is getting worse as we go on is the man power and time to simply record the videos and parse the videos. I personally record onto DVD and using a pinnacle video transfer which records to USB drive. These are no longer made so we need to come up with a new easy to use "device" to record with other than DVD, which has to be ripped then parsed.
Each competition takes about 20 hours  of video which then needs to be split up into individual matches. This takes hours and can be an annoying process. Many of the regionals this year have been recorded. Some teams chose to upload their files to youtube, I have been working on ripping them from youtube and saving them to my site to have ONE CENTRAL LOCATION for the files. Some teams have uploaded the raw video footage to the offline directory of thebluealliance.
If YOU would like to help parse the video please contact me or Greg Marra for logins to thebluealliance.com or firstvideoarchive.com ftp locations. We don't post the log in information freely because we want to know who has access to the directories. There are currently 3 regionals that need to be parsed  .
We don't need to keep remaking the wheel. We need to make the wheel better. |
As Mike alluded to, recording videos is hard work. The Blue Alliance is primarily run and almost entirely programmed by Greg Marra, with support from Tom Bottiglieri, Chris Jelly, and myself, but admittedly all of us combined don't come near Greg's contributions. Increasingly, each of us has had less and less time as we get farther into engineering studies, or the workforce. Nevertheless, Greg programmed an awesome new modular version of TBA this year with assistance from Brandon of CD and others, and while its not the same as the old site, its meant to run into the future and has behind the scenes support for new features like compiling videos of matches from different sources [team websites, youtube, vimeo, etc.], automatic video encoding, and just general lower maintenance.
However, everything boils down to the content. Each year we rely on teams and individuals to record regionals, split the videos into individual matches, and get them to us - at which point we convert them and get them into the system. It's a very labor intensive process, and in recent years its been harder and harder to recruit people to do it. We try our best to facilitate it by having Pinnacle recording boxes that we ship out to regionals, where all teams have to do is hit Go, but its still very hard.
We're working on our end to improve the organizational tidbits of making sure videos get converted in a timely manner, the website gets brought back up to speed, and Greg has some free time outside of work and writing TBA. But what we really need is
you. We need people to step up and volunteer to record regionals, people who can parse matches, and people who can help us organize that effort. It can be as much of a time commitment as people want it to be, but we need people who will commit to helping during the season, because inevitably people will push this off for more pressing responsibilities, and TBA is understaffed already.
If you want to help, and you want to see more matches on the internet,
get in touch with Greg, Mike, or myself. We'd love to get more people involved and get the community helping the way it did back in 2007 and 2008. The website has continued to grow at amazing rates, even with fluctuating amounts of video each year. Last year we saw over a 25% rise in visits to the site compared to 2009, and there's still lots of room to grow - we're just at the mercy of volunteers.