As an experiment this year we placed a Canon SX100-IS regular
"still" camera on a small tripod in the pressbox and recorded video,
with the lens pulled back to the maximum wide angle. We had tried
this in the past with live performances and were able to capture
reasonably good video and sound with minimal effort. The sound is
monaural, but full range. The camera has automatic volume control
which cannot be defeated, so your dynamic levels may not sound
true. Some of the larger bands went outside the camera's field of
view.
You may hear some pressbox noise and the sounds of the workers and judges.
If this is helpful to the bands, we may decide to continue this practice and refine it a bit. Since the same camera setup was used for every band, you can get a good comparison. The camera was 4 feet to the left of the General Effect judge as you face the field and it is his voice that can sometimes be heard, along with the scorekeepers.
It is hoped that by seeing and hearing exactly what the judges saw and heard that bands can improve even more as the weeks get closer to the State Marching Festival and work toward Honor Band status. Also, bands and directors often do not hear enough other bands to get a good comparison or understand why the rankings came out as they did. This way you can take your judges sheets, the recap sheet, watch the video, and see what judges saw, and have a better idea of what "the competition" really is as the season progresses.
Unfortunately, the camera malfunctioned (or maybe the operator malfunctioned) on Rapahannock and no video was captured.
The files are in .mov format. Thehe raw .avi files were imported into a Mac G5 from the camera, converted them to .mov using QuickTime Pro, and we cut off the "dead time" before your show actually started. To make the videos stream over the Internet, the frame rate had to be cut from the normal 30 frames per second to 15 frames per second, which makes movements strobe a little. These video clips play in the QuickTime player which is free from Apple computer at www.apple.com/quicktime
If you are using a Mac and Safari, the
video may stream right into your browser. The same works for
Firefox with the QuickTime plugin on a PC. To download, just right
click (or control-click on a Mac.) There is a 50-user-at-one-time
limit on our server.
If you try to download and get no result, please try later.
Most files are in the range of 15-18 megabytes. The
original files were in the 400-500 megabyte range and were too large to
stream and would have been difficult to download.
Here are the links which will become live when the videos are uploaded. If you get a file not found error, try again later.