National Tour at Atwater, this weekend!

[MattR]

I just watched them, Austin , you rule, I was rather impressed with your performance in a car other than your own...well done...That track was pretty cool

[AtomicLabMonkey]

Originally Posted by MattR

I just watched them, Austin , you rule, I was rather impressed with your performance in a car other than your own...well done...That track was pretty cool

Lol, well thanks, I haven't seen it myself yet. I think I could have gotten into the 62's if I had just plain driven harder... my second run was the fastest but felt like I was making lots of mistakes, so I toned it down the 3rd run... that one felt a lot faster cause I was smoother and not overcooking it into the turns, but turned out to only be 0.1sec quicker *and* I boned it and took a cone. So... I shoulda just hung it out balls to the wall on that 3rd run and seen what happened. It's kinda wierd adapting to the AWD characteristics after being in my nose heavy RWD car... the throttle-on response is real different.

[dknv]

Originally Posted by Dean

There were a number of shortcomings in how the event was run i could bitch about, but if I had followed through after each run to check my scores, and stayed by my car religiously, I probably could have trophied.

I know better for next time, so I learned something at least.

Besides the cone run that we didn't hear about and you didn't know about until after the run group -- what else will you do differently at another event like this?

For me, lesson from Sunday is - DO push hard on the 1st run to find the limits, then tighten things up for the 2nd, and if needed, 3rd runs. Also, really tighten my tennis shoes before course walking 5 times. And if I go back to Atwater I'll just find a motel there instead of Merced, and save another 10-15 minutes driving back & forth. Lastly - it would have been a good idea to get there Friday morning & take the opportunity to do fun runs. If you're going to participate in that calibre of a race, why not take advantage of every opportunity to learn what the car feels like at the actual event site.

[Dean]

The Grid organization was poor. Having the 2 driver cars mixed with one driver cars was their biggest issue.

Insufficinet ice/water preperation for all.

The Orange worker buckets were great Sat. but nobody maintained them for Sun.

Paddock space was not clearly defined, and we got ousted for what turned out to be no reason.

Open registration as early as possible so people can register as they arrive, not all in a 2-3 hour time slot. Similar issues with Tech.

...

[dknv]

BTW - I wanted to say Big Thanks!!! to Dean for letting me drive your car at Atwater. I think I prefer driving my RX-8 on the street, but the WRX is still alot more fun to drive at an autocross. And Dean's car is very well-setup.

[AtomicLabMonkey]

Originally Posted by sperry

I will edit and post 'em this week sometime!

Where's teh videos?

[sperry]

Originally Posted by AtomicLabMonkey

Where's teh videos?

Sorry, I am teh busy... haven't been able to pull 'em off the camera due to SCCA and SECCS meetings all week.

[AtomicLabMonkey]

Are teh videos still on teh camera?

[sperry]

Originally Posted by AtomicLabMonkey

Are teh videos still on teh camera?

Sorta.. I think some of my second day runs got accidentally recorded over with Winnemucca footage. The big problem is that since I just moved I don't have a working computer up yet to pull the footage off with. Hopefully sometime this week I'll get things up and running.

[AtomicLabMonkey]

Ya know, I'm still waiting to see those videos of my runs from Atwater...

[MikeSTI]

Originally Posted by AtomicLabMonkey

Ya know, I'm still waiting to see those videos of my runs from Atwater...

we all are

[sperry]

Cool, just as soon as I get that $150 from you guys for a hard drive big enough to capture the video to, I'll pull it off the camera.

Seriously, it'll take about 100GB of space to pull all that video off the camera... and I'm totally broke on drive space. I need to go get a 250GB drive or something.

[AtomicLabMonkey]

Originally Posted by sperry

Cool, just as soon as I get that $150 from you guys for a hard drive big enough to capture the video to, I'll pull it off the camera.

Seriously, it'll take about 100GB of space to pull all that video off the camera... and I'm totally broke on drive space. I need to go get a 250GB drive or something.

:shock: ~3 runs/180 seconds of video is going to fill up 100GB of HD space? Am I missing something here?

[sperry]

Originally Posted by AtomicLabMonkey

:shock: ~3 runs/180 seconds of video is going to fill up 100GB of HD space? Am I missing something here?

Well, uncompressed here's the math:

(((640px * 480px)/frame * 4bytes/px * 30fps) + (2bytes/sample * 44100samples/s * 2 for stereo audio)) * 60s/min * 90min tape =

(36,864k/s video + 176.4k/s audio) * 5400s of tape = approx 200GB

And I've got 6 tapes to digitize. So, uh, thank god for MPEG compression... but in order to make good video you need to pull it off the tape without using lossy compression... so for a whole tape you end up needing at least 100GB of free space to work with.

[AtomicLabMonkey]

Sooo... don't pull off all 90 minutes of tape at once - pull off those 3 minutes I wanna see. 180 seconds ~= 6.67GB by your earlier numbers.

[sperry]

Originally Posted by AtomicLabMonkey

Sooo... don't pull off all 90 minutes of tape at once - pull off those 3 minutes I wanna see. 180 seconds ~= 6.67GB by your earlier numbers.

True, but it's a hassle to pull just a few segments off since the tape isn't random access... in fact pulling video off the tape just sucks in general, regardless of how much you're pulling... it's just a crappy, tedious procedure. (Why don't they make video cameras with hard drives built in and save directly to MPEG-2 or something?)

Plus I've only got about a gig of free space on the computer that's got the fire-wire connection, so I'm gonna have to go and nuke a bunch of stuff just to do the 180 seconds of footage. I figure I need a big hard drive for my XBox as well as one for my server, so I might as well just go grab a pair of 250GB drives, and then move the server's 120GB drive into my workstation to use as a video scratch disk.

It's just a matter of finding the time to do it... which is why nothing gets done, I'm all outta time. In fact tonight I need to put together a flyer for the SECCS track day so I can advertize at the next SCCA meeting, Wed I have to go to said SCCA meeting, Thurs is our weekly SECCS meet, Friday I'm prepping the car for the AutoX this weekend. So it looks like I might have time around the beginning of next week to deal with my hard-drive issues. Sorry that video's not too high on my priority list.

[AtomicLabMonkey]

Your schedule and HD's have teh suckage. I think you just don't want people to see me driving faster than you in your own car.

[sperry]

Originally Posted by AtomicLabMonkey

Your schedule and HD's have teh suckage. I think you just don't want to people to see me driving faster than you in your own car.

I'm mostly just being stuborn. You know how that goes.

[AtomicLabMonkey]

Originally Posted by sperry

I'm mostly just being stuborn. You know how that goes.

"You've had this coming for a long time!!!"

[dknv]

This thread on sccaforums has links to a couple of Atwater runs, for Glen Hernandez & Jerry Lamb in DStock. Interesting to compare the two driver's lines, not that far apart but apparently enough to earn Glen a 1st, and Jerry (car's owner) a 3rd in class.
http://www.sccaforums.com/ubb/ultima...p/topic/36/124

[AtomicLabMonkey]

Hey, wow, look at that... people who actually downloaded their video off the camera onto the computer... :wink:

[MikeSTI]

Originally Posted by AtomicLabMonkey

Hey, wow, look at that... people who actually downloaded their video off the camera onto the computer... :wink:

razzz!