just a quick note Becky, my entry number (A. Hepp) is 84
"Round 2, Lap 4, Steakhouse Corner, 16+84
Car 16 nerfed car 84, car 84 forcibly struck barrier as a result. Car 16 CAUTIONED."
i don't know whether my opinion counts or not, but as it was totally my fault, i would feel very uncomfortable if #16 was punished by my mistake. i wanted to post this already, i remember i did but i can't find it so maybe i didn't press the Post button... so please if it is possible, make this caution null. thank you
Yes I see on the replay you struck the wall on the way into the corner which effected your speed and probably contributed to the tap you received. Penalty annulled.
OK, i'll be doing them properly after all the inquiries are closed anyway, that'll probably be the weekend. Hopefully by then the domain name will have moved and i'll be able to update the website too, although there wont be a major update until the video is finished as i'm concentrating on that now.
That was me! The RB4 would have definitely been backmarker if it wasn't for Thomm .With the current classification system, if Thomm sandbags a bit, he'd rack up more points!
I'm wondering whether the class of the cars should be determined by an average of the top three of each class heat in round1, to even things out a bit. Thomm (who's pace in the RB4 seems to be a freak of nature :razz is otherwise going to ensure the RB4 is never classed as a backmarker!
The problem is that on tarmac XRT and RB4 are very close together. They don't need any balancing in my opinion. But I don't think we should change the system mid-season. I believe Becky can use her clerk powers in a way to help with the balancing of the classes.
Just going to drop a quick note to let folks know that the UKCT server is about to be re-migrated back to the Redbus datacentre. This is likely to result in some temporary outages for the STCC LFS server.
The last week or so, at our current datacentre, has been ruddy awful. Our switch has been rebooted repeatedly without prior warning, and although the outages are brief, they're catastrophic to all aspects of the UKCT business, including hosting LFS servers.
We have a week of overlap right now, during which time both our old server and our new server are running concurrently. We'll migrate all the LFS servers once we're in a situation where the new server no longer requires restarts. That's going to be a couple of days yet. Just a heads-up, rather than annoy people by randomly dropping them from the server
Thommm is certainly fast, but so is Harvath in the XRT, let's not forget he ran most of the early part of the race in 2nd.
I think sandbagging kind of goes out of the window if we have a good turn out, as you just can't afford to throw time away in both qualifying and the race of the 1st heat, however there's some merit for taking the average time of more drivers as afterall what if one of the quick guys crashes out or doesn't turn up?
The problem is calculating it, i've got a fair bit of paperwork going on during a race evening anyway, around 8 sheets of my notebook are covered in quickly jotted down scrawl. If I get the chance to write some software to do this then that would work, but for now we'll have to stick to the existing system.
The general rule of thumb is that if it is an STCC web related machine it will break, thank god the racing makes up for it .
Broadcast Progress I thought you all might like to know the current state of play with the broadcast. Firstly it's likely to be almost full length coverage, with just a few short sections of the race cut (such as much of the time under the safety car etc).
There's so much going on through the pack I think we can easily fill the program with action, we'll barely be able to cover the heats at all.
I finaly got a chance tonight to sit down and make some serious headway, i've figure the track needs about 7 static cameras to cover it fully (static in position, but they still rotate and follow the cars), plus an onboard cam that floats between cars, a 2 or 3 special cams doing fancy camera work on cars through the pack and using standard LFS camera angles on a few battles for anything the static cameras miss, then I may do a few replay angles on some of the bigger accidents.
So far I have done 5 static cameras, each one is 20gb in raw capture format and i've only got 50gb of space left on my RAID stack so either i'll be deleting stuff or tomorrow i'll be compressing the rushes (unedited full length coverage of each camera) to make space for the rest.
Steward Inquiries As of yet i've not heard from any of the other stewards so the appeals are still pending, although I have already updated the summary above with my own opinion.
The closing date to report new incidents has now expired, although i've personally watched an aweful lot of the footage and I havn't spotted anything new yet. If something new is spotted, it's too late, so if your offense isn't listed you have got away with it!
It's not too late to appeal against existing verdicts though, the closing dates for appeals is Saturday midnight UTC.
I'm having 'interesting times' with the footage, the initial captures I have done in fraps and each 'stream' is 20+gb broken up into 5-7 sequential files of 4.90gb in size.
The next step is to recode them into a codec such as DivX but using maximum quality settings to try and avoid any degredation. This should output a single 'rush' file of around 1-2gb for the entire race.
But here's where i'm currently battling, my old tools are too old to handle the 4gb files so i've bought Adobe Premier and am trying to use it with DivX to create the stream. I've solved the interlacing problem so common with Premier (actually a user issue) and i've maxxed out the quality - but i'm getting artefacts on camera pans, I don't get this with my other tools, and I don't understand why Premier is getting involved in the encoding process and making things work differently with the same encoder.
Today whilst I am at work my computer at home is trying to use a trial of Dr DivX, I didn't have time to test the quality settings i've left running - which was maxxed out on everything - but the key difference is it seems to support a motion setting so i've maxxed all the settings and hopefully when I get back i'll have some useable files - but i'm not convinced it'll be ok because the high quality tests I did have time to do did not look high enough quality to me.
If the file sizes where smaller i'd break out my old Matrox Rainbow Runner and use MJPEG compression - but the 2gb limit just writes it off completely.
Anyway i'm sure i'll figure something out - or i'll be posting for help soon
I'd really not recommend compressing with a heavy codec such as DivX before editing in Premiere or similar, as editing tends to be unreasonably slow with compressed source material. I'd also recommend to not render to DivX from Premiere, rendering to uncompressed rgb and compressing in virtualdub is (atleast for me) probably 10 times faster, and you can play around with compression settings without having to re-render effects etc.
It needs some form of compression because I want about 10 camera angles with 30 minutes of footage each (it's easier to sync if you record the whole thing) and my RAID array just isn't big enough to hold it all unless I delete a load of stuff and dedicate my whole computer to LFS video editing, i've got 360gb of space, and it's 25gb per stream before compression.
The problem is all the 'light' compression codecs dont seem to give very good quality. At the moment they are in the fraps codec and at 800x600 - which is a waste for a 768x540 stream. Would it be worth my while to recode them to a 768 wide stream in uncompressed format compared to fraps? Ideally I need to get the 5 streams i've done so far down to 20gb or so to make space for the rest.
In terms of working with a heavy codec I may be ok because not only is my PC quite quick with bucket loads of RAM and a dual core processor etc, but once i've done the basic editing I can run off a stream or two to uncompressed before doing the heavy duty work of replays and captions anyway.
You propably have written down notes so you already know what footage you want to comment on. In that case you can pick the scissor and snip a lot of footage from the raw stream.
I would record one camera in one go, then begin snipping the interesting bits from it into a subfolder called "camera 1", with (raw) videofiles all called something like "lap3 9+84". That should reduce the files to bearable sizes.
Before you can do this you need a camera-book. You need to know all scenes that you regard as note-worthy. Then you strip all useless scenes from the long stream. Later you assemble (a small part of these) snippets to the complete video.
...Just an idea. Keep it up.
Becky : you should encode the files using a DV compression. If the quality is good enough for cameras, it should be good enough for you. And it is supported by all major video editing softwares (Adobe Premiere included).
The compression isn't big 25MB/s (5:1 ratio) : it needs 13GB for an hour in PAL resolution/framerate, but it should be good enough for you.
with 10 camera angles of 30 minutes, you will need only *cough* 65GB. Your RAID array of 360GB will be fine with it. You will even be able to encode the finished video in both reduced and very high quality and store the biggest one on DVD for archive purpose.
It is Thomm, but because we had a reduced field it seemed more sensible to reduce round 2 to a single heat. Of course, until after all the heats are run there is no way of knowing how many drivers we have because we dont know if any are lurking in LFS Spectator, so the decision to run 1 heat was only made as Heat C began.
I may introduce some alternative regulations to cover reduced entries and give more purpose to floor it in round 1.
I just went home for a long lunch and checked up on it, Dr DivX is churning away and the streams are of acceptable quality - but it will take over 24hrs to reduce the 5 camera streams down.
Thank you for the suggestion to use DV format, I will look into it when I get home. I wonder if Premier will put the camera pan artefacts in on that codec too or if it was just a DivX quirk.
Last week I logged out of the STCC forum to see if clearing my cache would make it update [it seemed to be displaying an out of date backup [probably due to its migration]. Now unfortunately I can't log back in. I've asked it for and received a new password, but the damn thing still says the login is incorrect. Are you in a position to be able to help or should I wait a few days for things to settle down?
To be quite honest Mike i'm not even sure how you are getting the forum page up !
I have just faxed the domain name registrar with a few legal documents that should raise their eyebrow. I expect the domain name to be transfered shortly, hopefully by early next week things should all be working again.
The forum is available here (notice how it isn't located on stcc.banshee, but simtouringcarcup.com). But there seems to be an issue with the user-database.
Ah of course, thanks for that. You should be able to get any broken links to work by updating the URL whenever it reverts back to stcc.bansheestudios.com. I'll update the forums heavily once the domain name is sorted out properly, so for now i'll continue to post here as the primary STCC thread and then duplicate the important information over at the STCC site when it's all working properly.
For now though there's an appeal and an open inquiry which have reached a resolution. I will update the consolidated listing on page 11 too.
Steward Inquiries - Update
Round 2, Lap 4, The Junction, 16+4
Car 4 overtaking car 16, car 4 veered under braking resulting in contact whereby both drivers spun. Fault has been deemed to lie with car 16. 16 WARNED.
Round 2, Lap 8, Steakhouse Corner, 8+6 APPEAL DENIED
Car 8 overtook by use of excessive contact. Driver 8 CAUTIONED.
oh well, i understand that had i not of overtaken it would probably would of been allowed, but as i gained an advantage from it then i suppose a caution is right
it really is a shame seeing as i was doing so well!
.With the current classification system, if Thomm sandbags a bit, he'd rack up more points!
.
oh well, i understand that had i not of overtaken it would probably would of been allowed, but as i gained an advantage from it then i suppose a caution is right