Coordinated Regional Video Archiving..

[Sagar Vyas]

I'll upload the good quality videos from Waterloo Regional as soon as I'm done editing (so dreadful.. argh) and when SOAP increase their quota.

[1359th Scalawag]

I have some questions about Soap.

1. For the Davis Regional, i've found the second day of qualification matches and finals but does anybody have the first day of qualifications recorded?

2. I noticed that there's room on Soap for awards videos. Are there any plans to get those uploaded?

3. Are the videos downloadable? It would really help us to be able to use some of the footage for a video on how this season went for us.

And thanks for all the awesome videos!

[Chris Marra]

Anyone looking to upload match videos (sounds like Waterloo, Pittsburgh, Buckeye, and Greater Toronto), feel free to send either myself or Greg Marra a PM, IM, E-mail, or other form of electronic communication. We can set you up with an FTP account to put them on The Blue Alliance website.

[Ellery]

Due to the SOAP overload as of Thursday I will start uploading the remaining Buckeye stuff to theBlueAlliance.net - FYI the day 2 tapes we got, Thanks to whoever gave them to Ed, but the audio quality is poor. Also due to my group paper that's due this Friday I got everything except for matches 68-80.

[ay2b]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

Some of the matches for the San Diego Regional on SOAP are off by one.

The match that is labled #30 is really #29. From that point, they are off by 1 until match 61. After that they are correct again.

The match labeled 29 is really 61.

See Greg's post below...

Are you sure? I just double checked my copy and the match labeled 30 is match 30. At the end the anouncer says "that ends match number thirty", and then I have the score from match 30. The teams in the score card match the teams that were playing. I'm going off of what I have locally; I have not downloaded the match from SOAP. It seems unlikely, however that a file would have gotten renamed in the upload process (since I just do "mput *").

Also, I have the rest of the SDC matches, but I'm waiting for more disk space to be available on soap in order to be able to upload them.

--AJY

[ay2b]

I know this thread is "Coordinated Regional Video Archiving", but are there any coordinated plans for Championship Video Archiving?

I will be there and will record one of the fields. I don't know which one yet; it'll probably depend on which one I'm working on.

[Joel J]

Yea, SOAP will be archiving the Championship Event (all fields, including Einstein).

[Travis Hoffman]

Originally Posted by Ellery

Due to the SOAP overload as of Thursday I will start uploading the remaining Buckeye stuff to theBlueAlliance.net - FYI the day 2 tapes we got, Thanks to whoever gave them to Ed, but the audio quality is poor. Also due to my group paper that's due this Friday I got everything except for matches 68-80.

I think the original tape had audio issues when I did the dubbing - not sure if it was a bad VCR audio connection at the event or FIRST's audio was a bit messed up. Luckily the visuals are ok.

[JJcos]

CD community!!!! I have the Elimination matches from Pittsburgh and Detroit Regionals, I want to get them on to the Blue Alliance's web page but I need the FTP access. I chatted with Chris Marra from BA but I couldn't get the access to work. I could get to the FTP directory for Buckeye and GTR but it wouldn't allow me to make another folder... Any help would go a long way for all looking for the 2 regional events still missing...

Joe J. FRC team 123

[Chris Marra]

Joe,
Greg should contact you with details on how to get everything up properly. Sorry I had to run off this morning, but I have a lot of work to do pre-nationals.

With the exception of matches 68-80 of Buckeye, Ellery got me the rest of the regional, it is available for download, and I am working on encoding them for the Flash Player. It is true though, some parts of Buckeye have poor audio quality, and some matches have washed out video. Stupid VCRs, why didn't anyone record in Beta? GTR also has additional qualifiers available for download now, thanks to Jonathan Norris.

[Pavan Dave]

Thanks to Kevin, I was able to host matches 47-81 off of FirstTube.
http://firsttube.org/pavan/lsr/
If you would like (Soap/TBA) you can link to the previous vids rather than host them yourselves for a little bit. I am also willing to host up to about two gigs off of my personal hosts if you would like/need.

Pavan.

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by ay2b

Are you sure? I just double checked my copy and the match labeled 30 is match 30. At the end the anouncer says "that ends match number thirty", and then I have the score from match 30. The teams in the score card match the teams that were playing. I'm going off of what I have locally; I have not downloaded the match from SOAP. It seems unlikely, however that a file would have gotten renamed in the upload process (since I just do "mput *").

Also, I have the rest of the SDC matches, but I'm waiting for more disk space to be available on soap in order to be able to upload them.

--AJY

As Greg mentioned, it appears that the Match List on the FIRST website is incorrect and not the videos. Sorry for the false alarm.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Travis Hoffman

I think the original tape had audio issues when I did the dubbing - not sure if it was a bad VCR audio connection at the event or FIRST's audio was a bit messed up. Luckily the visuals are ok.

Just realized I should give people a heads up about this, since I have a reasonable idea what happened. LSR looked to be having a similar issue. While I was ducked behind the video table setting up my computer to record, a mentor from another team asked if I could fix the audio at the table. There was next to nothing coming out of the monitor speaker, but strangely, the audio would come back if I shook the speaker and/or table. Long story short (haha, wait for it):

Our AV crew split out the audio in about the worst way possible. They ran the field feed through an equalizer and ground lift, then into one of the ugliest AV hacks I've seen. A single audio feed was run into a panel of 3 pin connectors. All the 3-pins were wired in parallel. So pin 1 of the first connector was connected to all the other pin 1s, etc. Out of this was a spaghetti of 3-pin to RCA adapter cables. This is the equivalent of stacking up a ton of those headphone splitters till you have enough outputs. This does two things. First, the audio level drops by 3 dB every time the number of VCRs connected doubles. So if 8 teams are recording, the audio drops 9 dB. Only bad if you set up your levels and then 15 other teams hook up behind you. The more important consequence is that if a single one of those RCA to 3-pin cables gets shorted out, everyone loses audio. At LSR, a single one of these RCAs ended up shoved under a DVD recorder and was shorting.

I, personally, saw this kind of thing coming and had already rigged up an adapter cable to come out a spare output on the EQ. But that was a bit of an expert move only recommended for people that know what balanced audio is and the potential problems it can cause.

My recommendations for those of you stuck with what FIRST gives you is to look in the back of the AV rack briefly and see if all your audio is coming out of a horrible thing where all the backs of the connectors are wired together. If so, I'd wander by the AV station before anything important happens and make sure you have audio. If not, check all the RCA connectors and make sure one isn't shorting out. If you have someone to spare to stand by the AV station and help everyone out, have that person unplug all cables coming out of the horrible paralleled panel, and connect cables back into the panel only as needed.

Ok, not quite as brief as I thought it would be, but still. If audio was fine one day and crappy the next, I'd lay good odds that one of those spare RCAs was shorting somewhere. And I'd watch out for the exact same problem in Atlanta.

[Ellery]

Well just to give some clarification we had no issues recording at FLR, and Buckeye day 1 from Travis, but Buckeye day 2 audio was definitely not balanced. But oh well now we know better to double check.

As far as Buckeye matches 68-80 I'm sorry I won't have time during the week to do them but I figured I did enough of them to give a good feel of how things went. As you know school work comes first! I will eventually get the rest up if anyone is really interested though.

[ems035c]

If your still interested, we in the process of acquiring more laptops for video encoding. This year we mailed out some laptops and video capture devices to some teams to encode the videos for us (SOAP). It was a good experience for all those involved. Encoding the individual matches in real-time is much better than watching a VHS tape and doing it that way.

It is our goal to webcast and archive ALL regionals next year. If you are interested in helping let me know. You can stop by the SOAP area in Atlanta if you like.

Good luck at the Championship!!!

-SOAP