Team Videographers??

[MichalSkiba]

I'm just curious if your team has anyone who films any of the events your team participates in (like regionals, finals, ...) and puts together [so they don't end up as 9 1.5hr tapes of raw footage ].

Last year, I regretably started late, filming only our trip to Houston. I say regretably because I didn't have any build material for sponsorship videos. As a result I'm starting early this year, in an attempt to cover everything (Hobby Show demonstration, Kick-Off, Regional, Finals hopefully, and everything in between).

Our team's trip to Houston boiled down to a only 1h07m .

I'd like to know if anyone else has put together anything for thier team in years previous, what equipment they've used, whether they found the video break-boxes in Houston useful and so on.

My setup is a Sony D8 camera, 2.2GHz 512MB Sony Vaio with FireWire 400 running Adobe Premiere 6.5. It'll be usefull for editing on the bus ride back.

THX.

[KenWittlief]

something we found to be very usefull is to have someone record our matches with a camcorder, staying zoomed tight on our bot

then after the match we can review the tape in the pit (we brought a 10" LCD monitor)

this allowed us to see things that you dont notice during the matches, and things the drivers cant see from where they are

for example, last year by carefully watching the tapes we noticed our 'flying squirrel' was folding back when it hit the wall, so it wasnt taking out as many stacks of bins as it could have

in engineering, data is everything - if you can play back each match, in slowmo if necessary, you can see exactly what your bot was doing.

[Beth Sweet]

Ha! Finally a topic that I can truly relate to! I'm the video-chick on our team, (also known as the paparazzi). I take video from kickoff all the way until the end of the season, and even of some of our off season events (if they let me get my hands on the camera!) I take video of the build season events (and trust me, with our team, there's always something to take video of, even if it's of Rob, picking his nose...) during the build season, of our matches and sometimes the matches of our next competitors and partners during the regional season, and of basically every random thing at the championship event (including rather attractive boys on some of the other teams....).

From there, I give my footage to Chris, the other senior in our Chairman's group, who puts it on the video machines and edits it. (and yes, normally takes out the cute boy footage) When we're done, we put the weekly footage on a local tv station during our alloted time so that the community can see it. Also, we make an end of the year video to show at the banquet, where our parents get to see some of the, shall we call them, amusing things that we do during the season.

As to the equiptment that I use, I'm not actually sure other than that Chris normally edits his video on a Casablanca editing machine. I have truly never looked to see what type of camera I use. We typically just take our video with the camera in my hand so I can do, interesting shots.....

[J Flex 188]

hi, i was waiting for someone to post something like this =) getting to know all the other videographers on other teams is a great idea... i started very late last season with W. Michigan regional, but managed to pull something together in pinnacle studio for a promotional video that was okay, but definitely not what im capable of. i was more doing it as a home video type project, but then one of the teachers recommended it as a good tool. If anyone has been to CR, the promotional videos done in the middle of the comps are an excellent source of ideas.

this year im trying to see what im able to with a copy of adobe priemere.. it would be nice if somewhere down the line we could get a copy of that software or possibly FinalCut Pro (mac's) as the animation teams do for 3DSTUDIO etc..

btw, what kind of equipment are you operating on? ive got a jvc handheld, thats no where near professional, and going onto about 3 years old but at the very least it handles mini-dv formats and does decent footage.

[echos]

A few of the people on my team including my self do the video ography for a lot of our robotics stuff. I would of attached a sample movie but the attachment feature is foo bared.

As for what equipment we use here it goes...
Camera:
Canon XL1
Canon GL1 or GL2
Sony PD-150

Computer:
Apple G4 - Dual 500 MHz OS 10.2

Software:
Final Cut Pro 3

[J Flex 188]

wow.. im jealous =P. i think we are probably going to see a wide spectrum of the number of teams that do do the editing, some may use a more home-based approach like me, or may choose to try it out at school (another option im thinking off, with the final cut option) the only problem being i wouldnt be able to work on it at all hours..hehe

Originally Posted by echos

A few of the people on my team including my self do the video ography for a lot of our robotics stuff. I would of attached a sample movie but the attachment feature is foo bared.

As for what equipment we use here it goes...
Camera:
Canon XL1
Canon GL1 or GL2
Sony PD-150

Computer:
Apple G4 - Dual 500 MHz OS 10.2

Software:
Final Cut Pro 3

[OneAngryDaisy]

Hah... I feel just like all of you guys- been waiting for this. our team is big, and i mean BIG on video. we tape every event we partcipitate in.. Our 'video cabinet', as we call it, is swollen from a insane amount of mini-dv tapes.. we really didn't use the break boxes at houston, just taped our own matches and pit events

basically, how we do it is: we have our own sony mini-dv camcorder as well as an assortment of sony still cameras. our school's tv lab teacher is really motivated, and after a long struggle with the school board got enough budget to buy 4 new vaios, so we do most of our editing at the tv lab.. recently we've been making dvds to distribute to sponsors, its a really cool way to sell yourself...

[echos]

Originally Posted by J Flex 188

wow.. im jealous =P. i think we are probably going to see a wide spectrum of the number of teams that do do the editing, some may use a more home-based approach like me, or may choose to try it out at school (another option im thinking off, with the final cut option) the only problem being i wouldnt be able to work on it at all hours..hehe

Not to create any more of a stirup but our schools Digital Media program is one of top in the nation. Also the listed equipment earlier is just a small chunk of what we have.

take a look at our stuff http://www.rbdigital.net/

[Ashley Weed]

In 2002 we attempted to assign a couple of students as 'videoist'. It didn't flow as nice as we had wished because there was just too much material to go over. Throughout the 8 competitions I drove in, my parents recorded our matches, and several times at longer competitions, it was nice to review the footage so we could recall a certain teams' capabilities.
I would recommend it to any team to try and have at least one match recorded of each team. That way if you have to work on alliance selections, you can at least see a visual of the team, and hopefully their 'appendages' were working during the recorded match.

[Jake177]

I don't really plan what kinds of shots I want before shooting, mostly because I don't know how the matches are going to play out. I try to get as much video as I can of our robot doing everything it can. Afterwards I log it all and rate each shot. After I know what I have for clips, I use a storyboard, well Jeremy does the storyboarding, to plan out the video. I organize it into sections and set each one to music. As for video labs, we do most of our work on our team's iMac. But when we need to do animations or when the website team needs the iMac our teacher lets us into the video lab.

[Jedi Padawan]

Hey what do you guys use for video editing?? (the only program I have access to is the windows movie maker ) What would you recommend Blae or Final Cut Pro?? Thanks

[Joe Matt]

Originally Posted by Jedi Padawan

Hey what do you guys use for video editing?? (the only program I have access to is the windows movie maker ) What would you recommend Blae or Final Cut Pro?? Thanks

For Mac, go iMove first, then move to Final Cut Express 2. On Windows, go online, go to e-bay, sell your PC, then get a Mac.

[MichalSkiba]

a video competition would be really spectacular, and add yet another focus to the already broad range of first. the only complaint i would have is that i wouldnt be spending enough time helping with the robot , id be filiming everyone else do it and editing it. but there should be plenty of time between ship dates and regionals to edit!

Editing is always faster when you've got a plan. The best is to edit as your clips come in. Then you'll be able to get an idea as to what your missing or what you want to change, while still having the oppertunity to reshoot.

BTW, does anyone know of a method/software of/to capturing the Kickoff stream from the net? (other then video out -> camera)

[MichalSkiba]

Specific shots (Houston trip):

-I synced the introduction to Come With Us by Chemical Brothers. This segment introduced the entire team and showed shots of our bus ride (from Toronto to Houston). I attempted to do what Kar Wai Wong did in his short entitled The Follow (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285104/). The music was the foreground and the image was the background. All the sped up highway and Houston shots were syncrinized to the the drum beat in the song. I used a similar sequence as was used in Snatch [where Turkish is jumping down a flight of stairs with his booty goods], for introducing every team member who went. The song had keyboard rises onto which I put about 3 seconds of 2.5x real time footage of the member, followed by a 5 second freeze frame with thier name. Making 13 such sequences was quite tedious.

-The ending of the song was a very brisk drum beat, to which I flashed 77 freeze frames of Houston. Each picture was displayed for 6 frames.

-I gave an introduction to the venues by showing a series of panaramic shots.
Astrodome: I filmed the lineup on the first day (walking back from the fron of the line to where our team was standing), the crowd flooding into the stadium (camera was sitting on my raised hand and I used the viewfinder to see what I was doing), and a general shot of the venue from ontop of our crate.
Reliant Stadium: Just before the closing ceremonies, I had climbed up to the restricted 3rd level seats to get a nice shot of the 20000+ kids attending.

-Between each section I had faded to black and let an orange text string scroll by slowly from the middle of the screen to the left side of the screen. (our school colours are black, white and orange).

-I filmed all of our matches from the level on which the walkway was. This gave me a nice unobstructed view of the entire field.

This is what I have in mind for a promo video:

1. Shots of the build sessions (ones showing planning, teamwork, safety and operation of complex machinery)
2. Panaramic shots of the venue showing the size, the amount of people and sponsor's banners.
3. Clips from our successful matches and any neat driving that we've done.

I'm stuck on making a catchy intro. Within the first 10 seconds I want the viewer to know what the team does. Following the presentation I want the viewer to be excited about our team and achievements, and answer who, what, where, how, why and when. Any suggestions?

Below are shots from Reliant that show where I was filming from:

[Winged Globe]

We do something similar, covering important pre-/post- season activities along with all of build season and competitions (well, as much as our videographer last year was around for). This was then editted into a few versions: a short "video-brochure" for drop-in fundraising use, an hour-long documentary for possible broadcasting (our video from last season will actually get broadcast on local cable at the end of this month, finally), and a much more informal archive for intra-team purposes (including all the stuff unfitting for public display, for whatever reason).

Last year, we had one very busy guy who couldn't attend a lot do all the filming on his Canon ZR-something (40 i think). He editted on his iMac with iMovie (sounds amateur, but it was surprisingly well done). This year, we may have up to 3 camera people running, which should get us a wider variety and coverage of shots to work with. We also might switch to Premiere/Final Cut, depending on availability and whether we learn enough to use it, though we haven't yet hit the point where we feel we need the high-end software.