Hey, i heard that there’s a website that has videos of EVERY regional match held this year. anyone know if there’s any truth to this?
i would assume you are talking about thebluealliance.com
i dont think it has EVERY match, just ones that have been archived by teams that had a webcast running.
Yeah, I would have thought that The Blue Alliance would be the place to go, but they dont seem to be taking care of the footage for this year. I tried to contact them a week ago with archives from the Washington DC Regional, but I have yet to receive a response. Maybe there is a different site that actually has match videos for this year.
If anyone is interested, I have match videos from the Washington DC Regional I can share.
http://thebluealliance.com is what you’re looking for.
But they only have videos from regionals where teams voluntarily archive them, then submits them to TBA. Thankfully, nearly every regional has at least one team with video from every match.
Yeah blue alliance has been a little less reliable this year than in years past. Check out regionalwebcast.com for archive of regionals we (987) attended. Maybe in the future we can expand our archiving.
Then it’s high time that we start pushing more teams to take up the task.
Every there seems to be a couple of ‘new websites’ that attempt to become popular like CD and thebluealliance (although, its popularity has decreased over the years), and nearly all of them don’t catch on because there isn’t the need in the FIRST community. Well, I now think there is a need for a website that, at the very least, provides links to all the matches online. People are still recording regionals, but they are just not uploading them onto TheBlueAlliance and have opted for youtube and other websites. The problem is that all the videos are scattered across the internet. As long as TheBlueAlliance continues to not listen to suggestions of providing links, someone could make a great website that would be a huge help to the FIRST community.
I’ve been working for a few years on a website that provides videos for FIRST teams as well as FIRST videos for the general public. ANYONE can register for a free account and post as many FIRST videos as they want. I’d prefer you link videos from YouTube (since my server is a bit on the older side), but if you need to upload to my server, that’s fine too.
I just started a new contest this month asking FIRST teams to add promo videos and through the month of May, users will be able to vote on their favorites. The winning video will be showcased in a special area, and the winners will have bragging rights!
Check out FIRSTObjective.org for all the details. Thanks!
Just curious on this topic, but is there any chance someone who is recording a week 6 event or a division to take the time and make an instructional video on this?
I would love to do some recording I just don’t have the know-how to do so.
I’m not doing Buckeye’s, but I’ll talk to 291 and see if they’ll let me document their setup.
thanks all.
Keep in mind the task of posting video of “all” of the matches on The Blue Alliance is a huge undertaking.
If you are interested in helping out here are some links that explain what is involved and how to do it.
http://www.firstwiki.net/index.php/2010_Archiving
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=784059&postcount=1
Attached is a photo that shows a typical “press feed” setup that is used for connecting your recording equipment to the house feed. This photo was at Atlanta a few years back. Most regional events have a similar arrangement available for anyone that wants to record.
-Hugh
Hi guys,
I run firstvideoarchive.com. I have been recording/archiving FIRST robotics videos since before soap and before the bluealliance. The biggest setback each year, someone else said it already and is getting worse as we go on is the man power and time to simply record the videos and parse the videos. I personally record onto DVD and using a pinnacle video transfer which records to USB drive. These are no longer made so we need to come up with a new easy to use “device” to record with other than DVD, which has to be ripped then parsed.
Each competition takes about 20 hours :ahh: of video which then needs to be split up into individual matches. This takes hours and can be an annoying process. Many of the regionals this year have been recorded. Some teams chose to upload their files to youtube, I have been working on ripping them from youtube and saving them to my site to have ONE CENTRAL LOCATION for the files. Some teams have uploaded the raw video footage to the offline directory of thebluealliance.
If YOU would like to help parse the video please contact me or Greg Marra for logins to thebluealliance.com or firstvideoarchive.com ftp locations. We don’t post the log in information freely because we want to know who has access to the directories. There are currently 3 regionals that need to be parsed :yikes:.
We don’t need to keep remaking the wheel. We need to make the wheel better.
This. We already have the websites we need. What we don’t have are the videos. Since FIRST leaves this up to the teams, then the obvious solution is to get more teams to record the matches. The more teams, the better.
The subject of few [inexpensive] RCA-to-USB devices is a bit tougher. It’s hard to justify a $50 purchase for 3-day use.
Are the pinnacle video transfers one time use? I know there are a few floating around online.
I hope to ask a couple local teams who travel if they want to make an investment in it to split the cost so that we record our local regional plus the ones we travel to which is about 3 other events in a year.
As Mike alluded to, recording videos is hard work. The Blue Alliance is primarily run and almost entirely programmed by Greg Marra, with support from Tom Bottiglieri, Chris Jelly, and myself, but admittedly all of us combined don’t come near Greg’s contributions. Increasingly, each of us has had less and less time as we get farther into engineering studies, or the workforce. Nevertheless, Greg programmed an awesome new modular version of TBA this year with assistance from Brandon of CD and others, and while its not the same as the old site, its meant to run into the future and has behind the scenes support for new features like compiling videos of matches from different sources [team websites, youtube, vimeo, etc.], automatic video encoding, and just general lower maintenance.
However, everything boils down to the content. Each year we rely on teams and individuals to record regionals, split the videos into individual matches, and get them to us - at which point we convert them and get them into the system. It’s a very labor intensive process, and in recent years its been harder and harder to recruit people to do it. We try our best to facilitate it by having Pinnacle recording boxes that we ship out to regionals, where all teams have to do is hit Go, but its still very hard.
We’re working on our end to improve the organizational tidbits of making sure videos get converted in a timely manner, the website gets brought back up to speed, and Greg has some free time outside of work and writing TBA. But what we really need is you. We need people to step up and volunteer to record regionals, people who can parse matches, and people who can help us organize that effort. It can be as much of a time commitment as people want it to be, but we need people who will commit to helping during the season, because inevitably people will push this off for more pressing responsibilities, and TBA is understaffed already. If you want to help, and you want to see more matches on the internet, get in touch with Greg, Mike, or myself. We’d love to get more people involved and get the community helping the way it did back in 2007 and 2008. The website has continued to grow at amazing rates, even with fluctuating amounts of video each year. Last year we saw over a 25% rise in visits to the site compared to 2009, and there’s still lots of room to grow - we’re just at the mercy of volunteers.
I’m pretty sure there are 3 complete Michigan districts on youtube. Can’t TBA embed those videos on to the site instead of waiting for someone to volunteer to upload them? I’m not the most tech savy person so that may not be possible, but that seems to be a lot easier solution to get more video on TBA and in one central place.
I have a Pinnacle video transfer device that you can have for your group, if you’d like. It takes video in from RCA (yellow, red, white)/Svideo ports and converts out to a USB drive. As long as you unload the videos as the disk fills up, you can reuse the device.
If you would like to have the device, PM me with an address to send it to.
If you’re interested, any video on YouTube can be linked into FIRSTObjective.org. Not only does FIRST Objective allow for comments and ratings of videos, all videos are now accessible through iPhone & iPod Touch (in beta).
Adding videos to FIRST Objective not only allows all FIRST teams access to competition footage, it also is a great way for the general public (non-FIRST people) to experience a FIRST competition.
I’m not saying to not add videos to TBA, FIRST Objective’s intended audience is slightly broader and may encourage more people to get involved in FIRST.
We want to do this eventually, but we don’t have the code written to embed YouTube videos yet.
I’ve been bogged down with other things and not able to dedicate as much time to TBA during the season as I’d like, but if anyone would like to learn more about how to get involved in hacking on the site or uploading videos, please reach out and we will figure out how to help 