Video Stuff

I've been trying to work on a compilation of video's taken from the last tournament to make one FSA video, but it's been slow going and tedious. I've got it rough editted to about 28 minutes, so I'll need to cut more than half of that to make it somewhat watchable to people outside our team. I've been using the new Live Movie Maker that comes with Windows 7, but still like some of the features of Movie Maker for XP better.

One of the things that sidetracked me is I started looking at wire to wire times. Because I record from behind and to the side of the racing lane, it's not easy to judge when a dog hits the start/finish accurately. When I was looking at some passes frame by frame, I noticed that the dog's shadow on the mats from the overhead lights gives a fairly accurate way to measure wire-to-wire times. Basically, I can view frame by frame on the video and log the time when the shadow hits the line to when it hits the line coming back. Sometimes, the shadow hits between frames, so it's not 100%... but it's darn close.

I was sending Zio on a full run during warm-ups before each match (with the gutter in place) at the last tournament. He typically does good turns like that, so I started out wanting to know what his wire times were on the practice runs. They ended up averaging just barely over the 4.0 second mark. I know he runs harder against a fast dog, so I picked out a few races that looked good and he was running wire times from 3.95 to 3.97! With a great pass, he could hit that elusive 3.9 second mark yet!