Or the lack of said videos. I don’t know if anyone else that attended noticed, but the AV work at the regional was sub-par compared to previous years. There was much footage of floors and carpets, and pre-made clips were all jittery when displayed on the screen. Unfortunately, my recording of the event was bitten by this poor AV as well. For whatever reason, the saturation on the video feed for teams was turned up about 5 notches too high, and I wasn’t aware of this until looking over my recordings just now. For the normal video footage this simply makes things look too colorful and could be filtered out. Unfortunately, the computer generated scoring screens and real-time scoring overlays are typically already at or near oversaturation. This combined with whatever was already cranking up the saturation in the video signal managed to completely distort and ruin the entire video signal. The result is video that looks like something out of a 60’s acid trip whenever the real time scoring or any computer generated graphic is up. As such, pretty much the entirety of the matches are completely useless, as are the award ceremonies. I very much apologize to any teams or individuals that were depending on me for footage of the event. I didn’t have time to watch the feed my computer was receiving and I very much doubt I would have had time to argue things out with a busy AV crew on a Friday afternoon either. I’ll endeavor next year to record practice matches as a test run to hash things out with the AV crew.
For all who care I’m not sure but I’m fairly certain our photographer got at least some matches on film. Too bad though if there are no good recorded matches.
I’ll see what I can make of things, but any match with the real-time scoring graphic up is almost literally unwatchable. Give me a moment to post something to youtube so y’all can see what I’m talking about.
So anyone that attended the Lone Star Regional, if you have video of decent-good quality please let Kevin or someone know so that we can give you the instructions (if you are willing to help) so we can get the footage out. I know I am desperate for footage just as many of you are.
Also if you were with or against the Robonauts on Friday, I have some of the matches in a “Driver’s PoV” type shot covering the field at an angle from the operator’s station. I will try to get them up soon, but I’ll be very busy in the coming days…
EDIT: Count me in on next year Kevin. I have picked up a few tricks as of the last few hours on how to get some footage from the regionals.
Well here’s a google video of the problem. I can upload a snippet of a full quality somewhere, but I think the fact is that the actual video signal itself was being corrupted by the excessive saturation. The rapid color cycling is by video input card trying to compensate. It will semi-stabilize eventually, and then slowly fade from craziness to plain oversaturated once the graphics are off the screen. Again, those colors aren’t encoding artifacts or errors from google.
It looks like I might be able to salvage some of the awards footage, but one of those files ended up corrupted so it’ll take a little more repair work.
Did the video look like this on the main screen or just these videos? It would seem more likely that the problem was with your computer. I have recorded to DVD from 6 regionals and championship with no problem atall.
The video you see on the large projector isn’t anywhere near what we get on our rinky-dink composite video feed for recording. If they’re running composite video to those projectors, I’ll eat my team shirt and then turn around and insist FIRST hire competent AV people. They’re hopefully at least running component up there, if not RGBHV or SDI, which would come off a separate output and run through a completely different amp and splitter. So the big screen being nice and un-trippy has little bearing on my problems. That said, the big screen still had its own annoying, non-catastrophic problems.
I’ve also been doing this with this same set up for a few years now without this problem, so I’m confident my setup works when provided with anything approaching a reasonable composite video signal. I’ve worked in the AV industry a bit, and I do know just a little about these things. I’ll admit that there’s a small chance I could have prevented this by turning down the saturation gain on my video-in card from the default, works-with-everything-sane value to something much much lower, but I was frankly expecting the AV crew to give me a good signal as opposed to a ridiculously hot one like this. And I’m not even certain that said gain affects anything more than a digital filter slapped on the stream after the A/D conversion has happened. In hindsight, I obviously needed to have my setup running on Thursday so I could check the quality during the day to make sure our terribly expensive AV people had properly set up their equipment. So I’ll be doing that from now on, as well as pushing with the RD to get my setup integrated slightly better with the AV gear so I can get something higher quality than a standard def, interlaced composite video signal. Since just about anything would be better, including writing off the whole AV setup and recording off a stationary HD camera, I’m pretty confident next year will work out better, at least.
Team 418 here,
We recorded all of Friday’s elimination rounds for scouting purposes. they are from a webcam in the stands, low resolution, no sound, and have no scores, but they are visible. another note is that they were recorded at about 2x speed for file size constraints. but they are there. Talk to Danny Diaz (that is his SN). I am not promising that we could even get them uploaded to anywhere, but we do have them and they are watchable.
Unless we can get footage from somebody you are absolutely correct. TBA and SOAP run off of volunteers who record events. No footage from the volunteer assigned means no footage for TBA/SOAP to host.