DDR Videos (The Importance) *Updated with 700MB of Videos!*

[Arrow098]

I don't really like posting on this forum at all and most of the threads I participate in get locked, but I'll give this a shot.

Earlier today I just received over an hour of very high-quality video footage from what must've been one of the top 3 DDR tournaments in the world (I have only watched a few minutes of footage so far). This tournament was run in Europe. I forget what the name of the place it was held in is called, but it is similar to the MCI Center in Washington D.C., just a little less fancy. The tournament was run on a Dancing Stage Euromix 2 machine.

This one hour segment was actually broadcast on live television. I know some people who were able to send me a copy of the original video, so I got very lucky.

Watching the few minutes of the video which I have seen so far was quite an experience. It brings a lot of nostalgia and spirit into one's mind.

There are many reasons for this. Firstly, I'd just like to say that this tournament was very well run from what I've heard and from the limited amount of media I've seen. Also, seeing everyone's family watch along was very cool. Most, if not all, of the contestant's families were present in a section of the stadium floor and the bleachers. The audience to contestant ratio was quite large from what I saw.

The quality of the video was astounding. This added a lot to it. I have never seen any DDR video of this quality. Every match was recorded, which added a lot to it as well. Not everyone wants to watch nothing but PA matches, but it is nice to have it all included. One may always skip around during the video.

Now let's get to one of my points. Hardly are DDR tournaments recorded today. Certain individuals may bring camcorders, but the video never gets uploaded to a public server. Some tournaments do have limited media, but the video quality may be poor or only the freestyles were recorded.

DDR media can do so much for the players. They bring back memories and good times. Videos, as the Southern Californians on this board would put it, are legendary.

When the Dance Dance Documentary was released, that was very cool. People said it brought back a lot of spirit.

The US is 9,629,091 sq km large. A player in Wisconsin can't travel to California for a tournament under normal circumstances. But I'm pretty sure that player from Wisconsin wanted to take part in that California tournament. Much of the country wanted to see the finals of the Fiddlesticks tournament, but hardly anyone had that opportunity. Videos allow for one to experience what others felt at these tournament, to a somewhat lesser degree.

I would like to make a request of everyone on these boards. If you are running a tournament or are a participant of one, please try to get high quality video of the whole tournament. Make this video available to the public. There are plenty of people who would gladly offer free hosting of the videos. You could even make the video into a DVD and see how many people would be interested in buying one. There is proof that many don't wish to buy a DVD, but you may as well try. The amount of money one will lose is minimal, it just takes a little time.

If anyone even read through this whole post, I thank you. What are others thoughts on this?

[Aoi-chan]

Read the whole post, and I love the idea. I'm always looking for HQ DDR videos and think that taping tournaments is a great idea. Not sure how much I could help with this idea at the moment, but sooner or later I plan on getting a video camera and taping myself and others playing DDR and even tape tournaments. We live in the digital age and I'm loving every minute of it.

[Disconnected airSpirit]

I also read it all. I agree completely.

I know Jdogg was tossing the idea around the DDRFreak forums of a video server paid for by DDR fans who want to see video.

I think there may be a thread on that somewhere...

Anyway, I also think that taping people at home is good too. I tape me and my friends and watch the video for fun and spotting weaknesses- if we created like a portal for individual-person videos, the DDR community would have a chance to comment and give suggestions on people's dances.

just a thought...I know it's a bit off topic.

[Aoi-chan]

I was just thinking about the distro aspect of these videos. We could use IRC and Bittorrent as 2 possible means. That would make things easier in one sense, since finding hosts and webspace to store all these files could get out of hand or too expensive. Something to consider (as I'm on IRC and using BT as we speak, it just kinda popped in my head so I thought I'd mention it).

[Neemo]

BRILLIANT!
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[Chesskid1]

there entire tournaments posted on ddramerica.com

[Arrow098]

[Aoi-chan]

One of the beauties of BT and IRC is there is no limit to file sizes on our videos, in theory. I know a few very good encoders as well, so we have resources and options available. But unless we find somebody with a lot of bandwidth and/or money, hosting large video files of any sort just won't work, at least not long term.

While BT doesn't have the fastest d/l speeds on the net (most of the time), it is the easiest way to spread the most files with the least amount of money spent and with proper distro behind it. Look at how anime fansubs have grown to great proportions because of BT. Heck, Naruto gets over 40000 downloads in just 2 days and usually over 60000 by the end of the week for each episode. That's just one avi file ranging in size from 170-230 megs. If my math is correct, that's over 7TB of bandwidth used in the first 2 days (@ 175 megs per episode) and over 10.5TB for 1 week at the same ratio. Ouch to anyone that could afford that much bandwidth on a single website.

Also, I believe there is another thread going around by CaptainCanada a while back dealing DDR videos as well. That thread is called 'The "Post Videos of Yourself" thread' and can be found here: http://www.ddrfreak.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=75786&highlight=

Might be a good starting point to help this idea along. But I'm loving this idea more and more ^^

[The Game II]

I agree with Arrow98, here are my comments...

Recording tournaments...

Recording tournaments are great because, that ends disputes between players and others. One person can say "Oh I was better because such and such," but they know that there will never be a video that will prove them wrong.

In every tournament I participate in, I try my best to get the whole shiznit recorded so, not only can I watch it several times and show friends, but to practice for upcoming tournaments.

It's tougher when I run tournaments. In one tournament I ran last year, I brought a camcorder and recorded for several minutes, running back and forth through announcing, taking scores, and trying to produce a good quality video. It's very taxing, so I let someone else take over. He had no idea what to do other than pause and record. There's also getting full-body shots of the players, and making sure you stop and record at the right times.

When I'm not involved in running the competition, that's when I feel I have recorded the best. For, Bemani By the Bay, I showed the brackets in every round after Round 2, got closeups of the results and I even interviewed the winner of perfect attack. Although I don't like watching that tournament because it brings back bad memories, it was one of my best works, if you want to call it that.

I think there's a lot of things tournament organizers should do. One of them is to write down the scores of every match and every qualifier and have a full-blown results page. The other is to find any means to get the tournament recorded onto camcorder.

There are parents that record tournaments themselves for their families, which is great. I know one family that records a tournament from the "Hello, and welcome to..." beginning to the "Thanks for participating!" end.

Distribution...

This is where everything breaks down. I have no ability to upload videos onto a computer, then onto a server. I have no clue where to begin. I would by all means put videos on a server so people could watch. That way, everyone would get off my back and I could stop hearing the "are there videos of the tournament."

Quite frankly, I was going to suggest to the mods that people be penalized for asking for videos constantly, and that they wait until someone offers footage.

I know a lot of us would like to upload and download tournament videos. Until there's another way to do it, I suggest distributing tapes or actually going to the tournament if you can.

--GCII
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[Broadband]

All you need to do is offer the videos via bittorrent. I distribute a 374mb game I wrote free and there is no way i could handle the bandwidth demands alone. Therefore you use bittorrent which is like a community download. While you download you also upload the file to others. It results in fast speeds and low bandwidth costs. PM me if you need more help with it as i have multiple servers already setup on my site dxgaming.com

[dasbacon]

Hurrah Someone who is enthusiastic as I am about DDR videos ;pp http://ddr.edwardk.info is the tracker that has been set up. Local tourny, Kansas City, Missouri - Spring Madness 04 is the videos i have filmed, captured, and encoded myself which indeed are high quality divx files. Also you can find Sportsworld on there as well.

Soon I will be setting up a public FTP in which anyone that needs there local tournies hosted can upload to the FTP. These files will then be reviewed for content/quality and uploaded to our bit torrent tracker.

i dunno we'll see what happens.

The TG04_WebTV_DDR_VCD.mpg was pretty well funded tourny. I cant beleve they are having Euro Cups lol. I liked the multiple camera angles but they didnt have my favorit which is a some what distant view of the player. To much close up stuff. The audio was just the output from behind the machine which gave awesome sound quality for songs and hearing the lame announcer. I always like to hear the persons feet stomping on the pad though. Im sure when I get the equipment for a tourny I will have two audio capturing devices set up for the "stomping" and the audio directly from the machine. Then create an OGM so ppl can switch to either.

[SkyLine400R]

Arrow has a great idea and a well developed speach a quality post indeed it has inspired me to film as much of my local tourny scene and find some good way to distribute ........ i'd love to see some live streams of global tournamants that would be topnotch
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[Arrow098]

Bacon and I had quite a long IM conversation about this. In case you didn't know, Bacon was the one who was hosting the videos on DDRFreak's videos page. We had some pretty good ideas about how we could get videos out to the public.

What's pretty cool is that I showed Bacon this thread, which sparked this whole idea. The reason we were talking was because we were working together on hosting a LoM AAA video (I didn't even know who Bacon was before this).

Multiple camera angles are a very nice addition to have in DDR videos. I believe that this European tournament had four or five cameras which were used.

About the sound, a unidirectional microphone attached to the camcorder works very well. It takes away background noise and focuses in on whatever it is pointing towards.

Many people have asked me about this European tournament video. After a little searching, I found a clip of it being hosted. The clip is about an hour and five minutes in length. It is on a pretty fast server, so broadband users should be able to download it in under an hour even though the clip is about 650MB. Another note about the video clip... It is in a format which is ready to be written to a VCD. I recommend burning it to a cd (not a dvd). This way you will be able to enjoy it on the big screen (at least bigger than your computer screen for the majority of you) without any pixelation problems. Most cd burning software should have a wizard to guide you through making it a VCD. Here is the video,

European Cup video clip

The system that Bacon and I have in mind will have gigabytes of video ,which are equal or even better in quality, avaiable to the public.

Bacon is very good at compressing videos, yet retaining the quality. This will allow the file sizes to stay reasonable.

What does everyone think about that video clip (in terms of quality, discussing the tournament itself would bring a lock to this thread).