Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
I'm not certain this is really that productive a use of a team's time and recording equipment. In years past, the "Let's fit everything into this shot" view of the field just hasn't been that useful, as robots end up pretty small and you can't really see much of what's going on. While the video editors do occasionally make strange shot choices or miss some of the action, I'd prefer getting a clear picture of 90% of the action to getting a vague picture of 100% of it.
I'll admit the nature of this year's game problem makes it more amenable to the overview shot, but I think we really usually get our money's worth out of the video producers.
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Ah, which is why I said HD. A 1080p wide shot of the field actually gives enough detail to read team numbers. As proof, I submit this panorama I took of a field in 2005. It's 1920 pixels wide and fewer than 1080 pixels high, to given an idea of the kind of quality you'd expect from an HD stream. Judging by some HD content I've seen online, you could probably fit in about 10 very high quality matches per gigabyte using H.264, and teams would be able to only download the matches that interested them.
As for the use of time, the guy camping beside the camera could do all the normal scouting activities and push a button before/after every match (the beauty of this plan is that it requires zero during-match work). Compressing/uploading it would probably take awhile, but not a prohibitive amount.
Edit: And to stay marginally on topic, the links all work for me perfectly now.