Recording Official FIRST Footage

[dez250]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

This is going to be a MUCH trickier issue. I'm not certain FIRST will want you just recording the footage for your own purposes. You'll need to get permission from the Regional Coordinator and probably from someone higher up in the FIRST hierarchy.

In order to do this, you'd just need your VCR, and then the A/V crew at the regional would hook it into their distribution system. I'm thinking this won't be allowed, because many, many teams would then want to do this, and the A/V crew can only handle so much work.

That being said, I can only suggest emailling around on the FIRST Contact list and maybe asking on the Q&A to see if you get an answer.

When you are at your regional, i would suggest asking the pit administrator if they know if there are Breakout (Multi) Boxes for Audio/Video present. These are used for recording the event. Normally they have enough extra ports where a team may beable to connect a vcr to tape their match, but only their matches. If you plan to tape a match from FIRST equiptment, i would reccommend to bring your own vcr(s), connectors and cables and blank video tapes.

[Kevin Sevcik]

I stand corrected, it appears that there are setups to allow you to do this. I was just thinking from and AV standpoint. If all the teams recorded all the competition, you'd need a 30-50 output DA for all the teams, and that'd be a bit pricey and not something the AV people would be likely to have.

As far as an RCA splitter, I wouldn't reccomend doing that unless it's an absolute last ditch measure. Splitting the video signal like that will significantly degrade the signal quality for both teams. The same goes for looping through VCR outputs, just not as much. The signal quality will drop a little for each pass-through. You can get a cheap Distribution Amplifier from radio shack that will do a much better job of splitting the signal. Just check with the AV people before plugging it in, as you might cause a ground feedback loop and put a 60Hz hum in the audio and video for the entire event.

[Kyle Fenton]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

As far as an RCA splitter, I wouldn't reccomend doing that unless it's an absolute last ditch measure. Splitting the video signal like that will significantly degrade the signal quality for both teams. The same goes for looping through VCR outputs, just not as much. The signal quality will drop a little for each pass-through. You can get a cheap Distribution Amplifier from radio shack that will do a much better job of splitting the signal. Just check with the AV people before plugging it in, as you might cause a ground feedback loop and put a 60Hz hum in the audio and video for the entire event.

Actually it really doesn't. In UTC 2002 I remember there was a bunch of VCR's that were series attached to on another and there wasn't any signal degradation that I noticed on my tape. Unless of course there are cruddy wires that are present in the series of VCRs.
I have used a RCA splitter for a while now, (2+ years) and have not seen any degradation of either the audio or the video signal.