Archiving Regionals Video 2009

[Jonathan Norris]

Last year we saw match footage from 32/42 (76%) Regionals, which was an increase over the previous year. But we can do better. It is still my goal to see every match of every Regional recorded, every year it gets easier and easier to do, and I think this is the year that anyone can do it. To make this happen I am going to look for a team of two other people to help me organize this. Our job will be to organize volunteers for every regional, spread the required information about uploading the video, share the information about how to record and parse the video, remind volunteers to record and upload the video, and organize the parsing of the video if required. If you are interested in helping me out, please PM or email me.

If you are interested in voluteering to record a regional please state so in this thread, and feel free to add your name to this list. I ask anyone willing to help me keep track of this list just update it by copying the last one, adding the new names, and pasting it into your post surrounded by "["CODE"]" text... "["/CODE"]" without the quotes.

Regional                                          Volunteer
Week 1
BAE Systems Granite State Regional 
Buckeye Regional     
Greater Kansas City Regional
Midwest Regional 
New Jersey Regional 
Oklahoma City Regional 
Washington DC Regional

Week 2
Boston Regional 
Finger Lakes Regional                           
Oregon Regional 
San Diego Regional   
New York City Regional

Week 3
Dallas Regional
Florida Regional 
Los Angeles Regional      
Peachtree Regional 
Pittsburgh Regional 
Silicon Valley Regional     
Wisconsin Regional 

Week 4
Israel Regional   
Arizona Regional
Bayou Regional 
Boilermaker Regional    
Chesapeake Regional 
NASA / VCU Regional 
Philadelphia Regional
St. Louis Regional 
Waterloo Regional                            Jonathan Norris (2809)                       

Week 5
Colorado Regional 
Connecticut Regional 
Greater Toronto Regional                     Jonathan Norris (2809)
Hawaii Regional 
Las Vegas Regional 
Lone Star Regional    
Microsoft Seattle Regional 
Palmetto Regional 
Sacramento Regional
SBPLI Long Island Regional 

Week 6
Michigan State Championship
Minnesota 10000 Regional 
Minnesota North Star Regional

How To Record
This is the most often asked question, and finnaly I have a simple answer for everyone. the Pinnacle Video Transfer, its a $99 ($95 on amazon, I've seen it for $70 on ebay) device that records a component video and audio input right to an external hard drive at the push of a button in glorious h.264.

If you are looking for a more low cost solution (requiring a computer, and someone to watch the computer..) check out last year's thread.

As for where to capture the video from, FIRST at all its Regionals provides a station with about 20 outputs where you can hook right into the main scoreboard video feed. We prefer this feed over you recording the matches with a camcorder, FIRST hires a professional company at every regional to tape the matches.

Parsing and Cutting Up the Video Into Individual Matches
If you really don't have time to do this after recording a regional, please contact us and we will instruct you where to upload the raw video.

This can be done with whatever video editing program you would like, every windows machine comes with windows movie maker (I think Vista does... I'm a mac user) and every Mac comes with iMovie. As for the output video and naming standards please see below!

Standards for Parsing:

• DO NOT include the announcers introduction, we are just looking for the robot action.
• End the video once the play has stopped, if you like you can cut in the final score (this is a bit of a pain, and TBA already has it listed on their site anyway).

Video Format Standards

• Format: MPEG4 or H264 (.mp4, .mpv, or .mov are all acceptable containers). WMV is acceptable, but for reasons explained below not favored
• File Size: 15-25 Mb per file, this roughly a bitrate of: 1000-1250 kb/s, with an audio bitrate of: 128 kb/s.
• Video Resolution: recommended 640X480, acceptable 320X240
• HTTP Streaming: when encoding the video to its final format of MPEG4 or h264 enable http streaming (for most encoders it will be an option). This will allow anyone with a smart phone, iPhone, or iPod touch to stream the matches and watch them directly on their handset.

Naming Standards
Check out this post from last year for naming standards

as for uploading you will be contacted by myself or one of the other volunteers helping me with detail of how to upload it to The Blue Alliance (TBA) and SOAP.

I am sure the TBA and SOAP people will chime in at some point with their plans for this season.