great news that after a long break the premier saloon car championship is back, fantastic work again. Looking forward to future races

Whee, eagerly awaiting the upload to finish

That´s a resent:

But:
Did I missed something..? Where´s Nr.8?

Downloading now.:hyper:

I thought the same, did I miss Round 8?

The broadcast for round 8 had to be scrapped, not sure how much I revealed in the commentary but basically I lost my hard disk array with all the filming on, and it was held on pre-X version of LFS. It would have been a huge amount of work to film manually so I elected to scrap it. It's unfortunate, but as you will see from the coverage things have moved on a little with LFS' X patch and our X-Technology .

Ah, ok...

Great race so far, lots of action

Ah I see, just finished the download now.:munching_

Quote from Becky Rose :

We offer four ways to view the race but as it involves uploading over 1tb of data it takes time for all four methods to come online, links will be updated as the various feeds go live.

Surely that should be 1gb?

Ooops yes it would. 1tb would be a bit hard to upload from a home connection! lol. I'm actually thinking twice about uploading to Google Video this time because their upload tool wont work for me and web uploading a 400mb file is ... well let me say I started, and closed the tab by accident! lol.

That, was the best STCC Broadcast ever.

Extremely good as usual.

Excellent coverage! The race was exciting, and the new camera system is GREAT! The coverage was smoother, tighter, and better controlled than all of the previous videos.

I know that this broadcast had to be pieced together long after the fact, but it sure doesn't look like it was. I do have a few suggestions, but I'm sure you already have plans to address them for the next broadcast.

I miss having Tristan doing commentary. The way you two would play off each other made for a very entertaining and educational race. You (Becky) seemed to be the excitable entertainer while Tristan was the grounded informer. I hope that makes it back next time.

The upcoming in-car shots and telemetry would be most welcome. I found myself wishing for in-car shots a few times during the race. But, again, the camera work in this video was far and away better than the others. Very smooth, controlled, and professional.

The new sidebar listing the drivers, their place, and whether they're moving up or down in the ranks is awesome! My only complaint would be that the three letter designations are a bit hard to read. I imagine they'll be impossible to read on 320x200 or youtube videos. Perhaps move the display over a bit and use full names?

I would really love to see "studio" shots of the commentators before and after each race. All professional racing series do this, and I think it would add a level of polish to the production. Of course, it would also take extra time and effort, but it would be nice for viewers to put faces to names and feel that they're really "there".

Overall, this was a very solid video and the coverage was excellent. I missed some of the things that have made the past videos so good, but also understand the time and hardware constraints. I can't wait for the next race (coming soon! yay!), and I'm sure it will be the best one yet.

Cheers!

Thank you all for your feedback so far, especially Cue-Ball for his considered response, i'll try to give merit to the questions with equally considered answers.

Quote :

the new camera system is GREAT! The coverage was smoother, tighter, and better controlled than all of the previous videos.

Thank you. It was a big concern of mine to use an automated system and I held off developing one for a long time because I felt the human touch was needed. In the end though, I thought the X-core software we have was too good to be wasted and with STCC not broadcasting I went about making this, making particular effort to be 'imperfect' and give it that human touch - although it does show that it is artificial on ocassion I think. I'm glad you approve, it makes all the effort worthwhile .

Quote :

I miss having Tristan doing commentary.

I didn't invite him but this wasn't personal at all, Tristan is a very busy chap and I wanted to get this broadcast out of the way super quick and move on to the next one as I need to catch up, and meating up with Tristan usually takes a week. If I finish the next edit quickly enough i'll invite him in again, otherwise I think he'll make his return on round 11 .

Quote :

The upcoming in-car shots and telemetry would be most welcome. I found myself wishing for in-car shots a few times during the race.

I think for round 10 we'll have some in car shots but X-Guage wont be ready, i'm not sure if X-Guage will make it's debut this season or not - but i've already come up with a system for in car footage in X-Cam... It does worry me that it will cut to it at the most innapropriate time but i've done me best and we'll just have to see how it works. In car is great for a lot of things, but it hides so much action from the camera it's very difficult to pick an appropriate time to cut to it.

Quote :

Perhaps move the display over a bit and use full names?

This is actually harder than it seems because on a video signal there is a designated safe area and if I put captions outside of it than some televisions wont show it. I have always had a commemorative DVD in mind for season end, and obviously next year we are looking at television, so it makes sense to continue to respect the safe area.

Quote :

I would really love to see "studio" shots of the commentators before and after each race.

So would I, I think I hinted at some of our plans for next year to include this and infact there is more I have not mentioned because contracts are not in any way near being signed. For now I could only do this with an old camcorder in my lounge using a tripod, it would not be professional enough, so I figure nothing is better than rubbish. . The virtual studio technology we are looking at is really cool though, but it would absolutely depend on a TV deal to make that happen.

Thank you

Great broadcast as usual. Big thanks to Becky for commentating that race all on her own...where was Tristan?

Some of the things discussed during the broadcast left me feeling excited about LFS again and the STCC series...and listening to Becky and watching the racing action makes me pray for motorcycles and a similar championship to the STCC in LFS(I wont let the idea die...LFS-GP).

Cant wait for round 10!

Excellent broadcast!:clapclap:

Great racing too.

Can't wait to see these new features in action, they sound great.

Once again, great work Becky!

Looking forward to Round 10, should be interesting racing.

Will there still be a DVD of all races at the end of the season?

Watching now, well done guys! You really need alot more credit for this stuff...

I do plan to produce a DVD still at the end of the season yes, I dont think it would have enough commercial appeal to warrant mass production though so it will probably be just for the drivers.

Well, I'm up for one definatly. DVD's are simple to make, with all the menus etc. You should have no problem and all you need to do it make one master copy and burn them off as and when they are bought.

i´ll dwld it, when i´m back home, hopefully at thursday night

I like the direction you're headed in. Good stuff.

Seems like you could use an extra pair of hands to direct though - leaving it to software looks a bit hit-and-miss.

Quote :

Seems like you could use an extra pair of hands to direct though - leaving it to software looks a bit hit-and-miss.

If everything comes off next year and we do go live then the commentators will be able to override the chosen car views to stick with a battle if they so chose, but at the moment because my computer is about 60% of the speed it was last week i'm having to record at such a reduced replay speed it's pointless me even adding that functionality because I can't get a feel for the pace of the race and what is important or not.

So any feedback you could give in what made it hit and miss would help me improve the heuristics for next time, so that the software does a better job. Any particular scenes, or was it an overall 'too much skipping about' or something along those lines?

All feedback would be greatly appreciated whilst this software is in development.

Quote from Becky Rose :

So any feedback you could give in what made it hit and miss would help me improve the heuristics for next time, so that the software does a better job. Any particular scenes, or was it an overall 'too much skipping about' or something along those lines?

I didn't want to give anything away about the race, but it was particularly evident in the restarts following safety car periods - not tracking the leader (presumably because the cars immediately behind him were closer together?).

I didn't think it skipped between battles on-track too badly actually.

One other thing: Are you running some third-party reflections on the cars? They looked a bit too glossy from some angles, esp. from the camera on the outside of T2/3.

Yes that's a really good point, thank you Kev, i'll work on that phase of the race with some heuristical weighting. I think I have enough data states to fix it.


My reflections were custom and we were not in sunny conditions, although thats a moot point now as I currently have a fresh install of LFS.

One other idea: Is the director app. aware of the league table standings? Might help if it made decisions about coverage based on which cars are challenging for the championship. Could be more important in later rounds.