Open Track Day Video: January 27, 2024

Another cool open track day on the 27th. We had a great turnout of junior and team drivers in the AM session and then another great turnout of Sportsman and Expert drivers in the afternoon.

We recorded a lot of the days action but only captured three of the fun races with the SlotTrak screens and these three were late-in-the-day and only three drivers remaining.

New camera view of SR3.

Still, for those interested, below is a link to those races on Rumble. I edited each video as much as possible but didn’t have time to reduce them to the nitty-gritty, so you’ll have to fast-forward through crashes or just grin and bear it. And, yes, we crashed a bunch.

The main reason for posting these particular videos is to show everyone a new video shooting scene setup. If you have time, please check it out. This setup utilizes two cameras above opposite corners of the track and switches between each view throughout the video, showing the SlotTrak scoring screens in one of the two whole-track scenes.

https://rumble.com/c/c-3364960

Please feel free to comment below. The next step in this video venture is to get some close-up video of various areas of the track and be able to produce slow-motion shots of the action.

Thank you all for showing up and supporting another very fun track day.

SR2 Straight Road Course

Next Saturday will be another open track day, if enough interest. Our racing season-opener will be February 10th. Stay tuned for more details on our first racing series of the 2024 season. It’s all open-wheel cars and probably three oval events and two road course events. Hopefully, one of the oval events will be held on SR2’s oval or road course.

Okay, shut up and drive!

Final Round of 2023 50/50 Xtreme Series Captured On Video

Yep, we video-recorded all four official races of Round 4. Could be a little boring since we didn’t have enough marshals to pull off a normal race, so there are a lot of yellow flags and other interruptions. However, you can fast forward, rewind, skip, whatever. The bottom line is you can learn a lot about reviewing how you did during a race.

Check out what’s here and let me know what you think. Lots to work out, including better lighting, presentation, and plenty of other improvements.

Okay, shut up and drive!

SR3 Video Session: Qualifying Session with SlotTrak

First crack at video recording on SR3. It’s a bit larger track and difficult to get one shot of the whole course. This is a qualifying session with a Viper V-SPEC car using a typical Indy-style qual session.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTiP3JR-92A[/embedyt]

Some lighting issues to resolve but might work for recording races. If not, will have to do dual cameras to break the track into two sections and get a better capture of the action.

Slot Car Racing Video Is Nice!

Still pursuing video recording of races at Stewart Raceway. The initial goal was to display the whole SR2 track on-screen, which was possible using inexpensive cameras. The next goal was to get the Race Management screens/windows in the recordings so viewers could see what the heck is going on.

Thanks to Open Source software developers, and just plain incredible talent in that realm, displaying the race management computer’s screen is possible. In fact, you can even display windows and areas of another remote or local computer’s screen–way cool!

So this video is a 10-lap segment race, utilizing fuel and tire allocation settings of SlotTrak’s RMS. SlotTrak is an amazing race management system.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp0UH0ZbSdY[/embedyt]

Let me know your thoughts on this addition to the raceway. We can also do live streaming of race events with this setup. However, we have limits to how much data we can push to the Internet right now. That said, we could certainly live stream special events if warranted.

Okay, shut up and drive!

Video Might Be Nice

Well, I’ve had the equipment for well over a year now so I decided to play around with video recording races. At the moment, I’m trying it out on SR2, which is easier and more comfortable to test and dink around with this stuff.

I’m using cheap CCP 4K cameras, which are not ever going to produce professional looking video, but they are cheap. Right now I’m just focusing on capturing the whole track for the duration of a race. The issue with video is storage, just one heat of a short race can be as much as 10GB of data, depending on the length of the race.

H.O. scale racing adds another complexity in that the cars are the smallest and require the best possible capture resolution, which adds to the storage and video quality problems.

Anyway, this is my first crack at it. I need to work with my lighting director and improve in that area but it looks like–with a bit more tweaking–we can record a full race and be able to replay it, not only for posterity, but for entertainment and forensic evaluation afterwards.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAA9HaAAiE8[/embedyt]

Theoretically, I could also include the RMS screen (SlotTrak or RC) in the video, that would be way cool. I’ll work on the that soon.  After that, it’s going higher frame rates and producing good slo-mo action of crashes, starts, and finishes.

Please let me know what you think and any ideas you may have to make this more beneficial to us and our massive race fans.

Okay, shut up and drive!