The Blue Alliance, What Happened?

[jamie_1930]

For the Finger Lakes Regional and now in preparation for the North Carolina Regional I have gone through every team competing at those regionals to find photos on the blue alliance, including on the link to photos on chiefdelphi. After going through this and finding only 5 or 6 photographs when there are 44 competing teams, in each regional, it is getting kind of depressing. Also I have yet to find a regional that the blue alliance has covered with match footage as in years past, so my question is what happened to the blue alliance this year? Why is there so little information on it? And is there anything teams can do to help the blue alliance get more information onto the website?

[Andrew Bates]

It's hard for them to get video up real fast. It's run mostly by a couple of guys who are both busy with their lives and college classes. It also depends on other people giving them the video to put up. They can't be at every regional so they rely on others to get them video. Greg Marra one of the guys who runs the site made a plea in this thread for video to put up. As for photos, that comes down to most teams these days either don't wish to show off their robot till the regional, don't know that they can submit a photo to TBA, or just haven't gotten around to it.

[ideasrule]

I'm kind of disappointed too. I'll try my best to get videos of the Waterloo regional coming up in a week. No promises though, since I've no experience in doing this.

[nuggetsyl]

We should make a game to see which team/person can post the most pics of other teams. Go out with your cameras to regionals and start taking high quality shots send them in to tba and the best photo wins. I will talk to my team go get most of nj posted.

[artdutra04]

Even on ChiefDelphi, the number of fully completed robot photos this season has been lacking significantly behind previous seasons.

[Chris is me]

I take scouting pictures on my iPhone, which has FRC tracker directly linked to TBA. I'd be happy to upload all of CT's robots to it.

[Dancin103]

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

We should make a game to see which team/person can post the most pics of other teams. Go out with your cameras to regionals and start taking high quality shots send them in to tba and the best photo wins. I will talk to my team go get most of nj posted.

Ok buddy. We're on it. We did this for flordia, I guess we should post those pictures for everyone. We're getting photos in philly too. Let's make it a goal to get at least 80% of teams photos up for Championship.

Cass

[Chris is me]

I think with public awareness, more people would be willing to post their pit scouting pictures. For example, I'm sure if I asked a 1714 alum nicely (and if they had photos digitally and available) they could post Wisconsin photos.

It'd also be nice to crosspost photos to Chief, but that would flood CD-Media.

[ChristinaR]

This is something right up my alley. While I rarely post them to Chief Delphi, I do my best at every event to photograph as many teams as I can. For one, photos can serve as a useful scouting tool. Also, as I've found, many teams lack quality photos of their robot for use on the web, promotional materials, etc.

I usually don't post to CD because of the amount of photos I take. However, they can always be found on my Flickr a couple days after the event (here). I went to 5 regionals last year and championship to try and get pics. This year isn't as packed, but we'll see. I can't be everywhere, but I do what I can.

On my flickr, you can search tags as every photo has been tagged with the teams it contains. Searching frc## will pull up the teams (that is, no preceding 0s, thus 25 is frc25, etc).

It wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea to have a Flickr pool with the year's photos, that way you can search by tag and it won't overrun CD-Media.

[Greg Marra]

Hi! I'm one of the folks who runs The Blue Alliance.

corpralchee is correct - All of us running The Blue Alliance are college students, and it is just something we do on the side. It's a labor of love, but it always comes second to our classes, job searches, and grad school applications. We do our best, particularly during competition season when fast turnaround is important, but we're not always as expedient as we'd like to be.

With regards to photos, we used to be able to get them from FIRST directly, but last year they asked us to discontinue this practice. We now rely 100% on volunteer submitted photos. If someone wants to make the TBA photo archive rock, please assemble a directory of photos named ###.jpg, and send it to me.

With regards to videos, we rely on community submitted videos. Converting the videos into a file format suitable for streaming on the site is sometimes very easy and sometimes takes some tricks. This year, it seems like less people are archiving the regionals, which means we have no video to post. If you have video of an event, please contact me.

I hope this helps make The Blue Alliance's process a little bit more transparent. The fact of the matter is that it is a lot of work, and we'd appreciate as much help from the community as we can get. If anyone has ideas for how we can better help the FIRST community, please post them or send them my way. We will look at any advice, particularly ideas that make it easier for us to help you.

Thanks,
Greg

[MissDaisyGirl]

I too have noticed the lack of information on The Blue Alliance and can sympathize with the people running it - I know it must take a lot of work. And because I have now realized how much I miss it I just want to say thank you for developing such an awesome website.

As for match video, I know that we taped only our own matches and I honestly have no idea what they look like at the moment but I'll probably get them on YouTube before mid next week (NYC we're talking about here). I guess I was under the impression that you got the direct feed from all of the jumbotron video from each event. :-/

As for photos, I did not even know that teams could submit their photos. Good to know now - we have a bunch from NJ and NYC, some of which are on our Flickr. I will try and condense some of this information for you.

[Kaushal.K]

Scouting members of Team 1241 would like to be involved! Unfortunately at FLR (week 1) we were short-staffed on experienced scouts, thus were unable to take pictures.

We will definitely do it for GTR (week 5) though! Let me know if there are any specific shots/preferred style of photography (keep it basic though if you don't mind, I'm no pro).

Edit: We also have some match video's from FLR, they are currently being uploaded on our youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/team1241). I'm not sure about the quality, as I wasn't at the regional but hope they help!

[Kims Robot]

Originally Posted by Kaushal.K

Scouting members of Team 1241 would like to be involved! Unfortunately at FLR (week 1) we were short-staffed on experienced scouts, thus were unable to take pictures.

We gotcha covered 1511 has pictures of I think all but one or two robots (the ones that werent done thursday night). They arent all the best (some are a bit blurry) but they are better than nothing. I will get them setup and sent in tonight.

[Chris Marra]

Originally Posted by MissDaisyGirl

I guess I was under the impression that you got the direct feed from all of the jumbotron video from each event. :-/

On the topic of recording regionals, we only get video from events where people, or regional planning committees, have thought of this beforehand. We have three mobile recording devices [set it and forget it] that we ship into and out of events frequently, as well as video capture hardware for laptops [slightly more involved]. FIRST does not do any of the video capture, but the AV teams running regionals have never denied us a feed, and usually set up a table for anyone who volunteers to do this.

As has been pointed out in previous threads, if you want to see your regional recorded, just let us [Greg or I are the primary contacts] know and we can get you all the hardware you need and walk you through it, which is quite simple. If your team sometimes takes video of the whole field from the stands for scouting purposes, that's actually even better because it shows the match action, and not close-ups of robot components that cameramen seem to like. After the fact you either mail us everything back, or upload the videos to our server. If you didn't cut them into individual matches [sadly, this hasn't been fully automated yet], we try to solicit volunteers to do that, and then we handle the video conversions to make streamable and downloadable versions.

Both the video and photo process can come down to a lot of manual work since we can't get the photos from FIRST nor hook into their systems for recording, so we do rely on volunteers. The Blue Alliance is really just a couple of college students, so the more you can help as a community, the better.

[Kims Robot]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

If someone wants to make the TBA photo archive rock, please assemble a directory of photos named ###.jpg, and send it to me.

So I went through all of our scouting photos and event photos that I had for FLR, and we are missing the following teams:
145,188, 211, 250, 3044, 1591, 3003
So if they arent already on TBA (I didnt check the list), someone else will need to supply them.