Hey everyone! As a new season of the FRC Top 25 and Mike and Justin in the Morning is approaching, Justin and I are excited to announce our second annual “Premiere Night” which will be happening on February 22nd, 2014 at 7PM eastern!
Premiere Night is a chance to show of your robot publicly for the first time after build season is over! Your team is able to submit a video to be shown live as hundreds of FIRSTers huddle around computers across the world to watch what your team has been up to all build season.
We have made some changes to the format of this years event (thanks to your suggestions), so please watch the PROMO VIDEO HERE, as well as check out all the details below. You can also find all of this information on our new and improved website at http://www.FRCTop25.com
When: February 22nd, 2014 at 7PM Eastern
Where: www.FRCTop25.com
Details:
Videos must be submitted by Friday February 21st at 9PM Eastern
Video must be uploaded to YouTube as an UNLISTED Video
Submit link to video with the form on our website
Videos MUST be less than 90 seconds long
Teams must not release videos of robot/complete mechanisms prior to Premiere Night, or your team will be disqualified from participating
Small pictures or “teasers” are ok, as long as they don’t show complete mechanisms.
The last few time slots are reserved for teams that were in the top 10 of the 2013 Final Rankings (610, 1717, 33, 469, 987, 118, 254, 1986, 2056, and 1114)
Questions?! Please email us at [email protected] 2014 is shaping out to be the most exciting year yet, and we’re really looking forward to this event!
This was a big success last year and a lot of teams gained exposure through this premiere night. I’m glad teams have this opportunity again.
However, I’m concerned about the requirement of robot secrecy. I definitely noticed last year that some of the usual suspects posting info in the last two weeks did not get to do so because of this contest. Historically, 2791 has posted mechanism photos and designs throughout the build season. Last year we weren’t able to do this because of our decision to participate in this reveal. I’m sure many other teams dealt with this same issue as well.
What this means is that less information is exchanged at the end of build season, information that can be extremely helpful to other teams. Videos of partially functional robots in Week 5, completed robots several days before ship, etc. often serve as inspiration for teams struggling to get their robot to spec. I know 2791 has used information posted on CD by teams way farther ahead of us to design last minute robot fixes more than once, and I know many others have done the same.
As this contest gets more and more popular, this means more and more FRC teams will not be able to publicly talk about their designs, post videos of mechanisms running, or otherwise discuss their completed robot in public. I know the contest is optional and teams could opt not to participate if they individually value sharing designs. But what about the teams that could really go either way on design sharing, but really desire the exposure this event gives their team? I fear that in the name of a fun reveal night we’re going to continue to stifle discussion and openness in the FRC community, and that is the opposite of what I think would be best for FRC. I can’t speak unilaterally for my team just yet, but I personally don’t want to be part of a project that makes secrecy mandatory.
All of that said, this was a great show and a great opportunity for so many teams to show off their hard work last year. I don’t want to minimize that or the hard work you guys have put in. I just personally wish it didn’t have to happen at the expense of open communication between FRC teams, and this seemed like a good venue to express that concern.
I’ll echo this concern. I think we ought to do everything we feasibly can to encourage exchange of designs and ideas amongst teams - it results in the betterment of the competition for everyone.
I’ll add my name to this growing list as well. I love premiere night, I think it’s a great idea. It’s your show and you get to make the decisions but Spectrum won’t participate if we wouldn’t be allowed to have our build blog all season.
I hope everything goes well and I look forward to watching all the videos but I also hope a lot teams choose not to participate and instead publish earlier in the season.
Same thoughts here. Last year we did participate, and only posted a few teasers before the premiere night. However, if this year we choose to be more open with our designs and information, we wouldn’t be able to participate this year.
I agree. Trading a season of improved matches for 90 seconds of recognition is a poor trade, I think. Last season we saw LOTS of very useful totally public sharing, and I hope we see more of that this year. I hope we follow in the footsteps of the great work Spectrum did last year.
I look forward to seeing some of the perennially secret robots unveiled, though!
While we respect the feedback from the FRC community, we feel that Premiere Night inherently means you’re seeing something for the first time.
If a more “open” build season is what your team enjoys then of course we encourage you to keep doing that. We do feel however that showing videos of robots that have already been seen doesn’t maintain the integrity of the event.
While I wish every FRC team would participate, every team has the right to decide if being a part of Premiere Night is something they want to do. There are some creative ways to build suspense and excitement for your robot without violating any of the stipulations for participation.
I’m very excited to hear this is returning again. Mike and Justin always put on a good show.
As to the secrecy restriction: I think that it is reasonable for Mike and Justin to impose that. They want their “premiere night” to be the premiere of the robots they show. If you want to be more open with your robot design, that is completely okay too. You have chosen to premiere your robot gradually over the course of the season. By the premiere night everyone has already seen it. As the popularity of the show grows and more teams submit videos perhaps it would be better for that time slot to be used on a team’s robot that no one has seen before instead of the one that they saw on cd and used for inspiration.
I see both sides of the secrecy argument. I think that teams can still find a way to help others while maintaining the secrecy that Mike and Justin want. I think that most of these problems will sort themselves out during the season.
Thank you for the 90 second limit! I enjoyed many of the videos last year but for a team that has a cycling robot with 1 auto mode and a 10 pt. hang, a 3.5 minute video gets slightly redundant. I do appreciate the flashing LEDs but if that is taking close to 30 seconds of your video it gets a little tiring…
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the wording is complete mechanisms and complete robots are not allowed to be shown. Documenting prototypes with video would then be perfectly fine because they aren’t completed mechanisms. Thus, much of Spectrum’s build blog would be perfectly legal-- only the videos of testing finalized mechanisms and pictures of the powdercoated frame would not be allowed.
All in all, I think that’s a perfectly fine compromise-- if you’re showing off your completed robot or completed shooter before the reveal, you aren’t actually revealing anything as the entire surprise is spoiled already.
I’ll try to get the budding videographers on my team interested in this-- it sounds like it’ll be an awesome event again this year!
Correct. Complete systems and prototypes can not be shown ahead of time if you plan on appearing in Premiere Night. But documenting prototypes of partial systems would be allowed within reason. Hope that clears it up.
Mike and Justin thanks for doing premiere night again. I thought it was great last year and i know 3266 plans to submit our unveil video again this year. We’ll probably make a short version for premiere night and have a full length video on our YouTube channel. One of the best things about premiere night last year was seeing a whole lot of other robots at once, which gave us a better idea of how our bot would stack up against the competition. And it was so rewarding to read the comments about our robot. I remember someone calling it a “baby 148” which was easily one of the best complements I could hope for.
As far as the restrictions on prematurely posting pictures and videos of mechanisms it’s completely reasonable to ask this. I know we’ll be posting teaser videos like we did last year but are glad to keep our complete design under wraps. It’s pretty simple, if a team doesn’t agree with your requests then they don’t have to participate. You don’t have to do premiere night it’s a bonus for us teams, we need to keep that in mind.
Wow, talking about top25 already? Oh god, that means the season’s coming soon…
Excited for the new criteria- hopefully this Premiere Night will be even better than the first! 1923 plans on making a video for the robot this year, so we’ll make sure to talk about contributing to the show.
We fully understand the enjoyment teams get by posting their progress throughout the season. I saw some great stuff from Spectrum and loved their build blog. It’s important to us that those kinds of things continue and that Premiere Night isn’t seen as a reason to stop.
Things like this…
would be perfectly fine.
However this video, which reveals a big component of the robot (The raised style shooter) would be too much.
As I said there are creative ways to document your progress without needing to give anything away…
I hope this clears up some of the confusion.
During build season, if you’d like to run anything past Mike and I before posting don’t hesitate to do so. [email protected] Thanks!
I understand your position Justin and like I said before you have every right to make that decision however we still won’t participate if we can’t release our robot. The releasing is an important part of helping teams (For the record. the raised shooter didn’t help any teams including ours ).
I will still be watching and our team will still have a viewing party like we did last year. I love the idea of premiere night but I still think it’s better for the community to have more open robot concepts.
I don’t think there is significant value added to premier night by restricting what a team can share about their robot. I think the value of showing a lot of robot videos all at once in one place is to make it easy for people to see lots of robots and get jazzed up. This brings in new people who would not otherwise have combed the forums for robot videos. Letting teams show their robot wouldn’t affect that value because the people not combing the forums wouldn’t see it anyway.
Perhaps there is a middle ground though, Top 25 wants exclusive content (at least until after it’s shown) to make their show more interesting and the community wants to share information about others robots that could help them and others. What if premier night focused on “showy” video that’s intended to show off a fully finished robot and all it’s capabilities. Teams would submit a video of the entire robot working and playing the game to Top 25 but would still be able to share short videos focusing just on a individual part of their robot. These short videos would be limited to a single mechanism working and maybe by time as well, just to display functionality. While these videos would show off mechanisms they wouldn’t show off an entire functioning integrated robot playing the game, which is the really important and impressive part anyway. Top 25 is still going to be the first place that anyone who hasn’t been combing CD would see robots so it’s still a complete premier to plenty of people.
Hey everyone! Now that kickoff is here, we just wanted to put out a friendly reminder about Premiere Night. We would love to show as many robots as we can! Please check the above video and information for all of the details.
As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected]
