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Apologies if this should be in the Lounge or somewhere- move it if it should.
One of the things that grabbed me when reading Patrick Veitch’s book was when he said he had a video library of the past 5 year’s races on a hard drive on a PC and had them indexed in such a way as he could pull up any race in seconds. My question is how practical this is and how costly? What are the nuts and bolts of doing it? Do organisations like the Post, Timeform, Corals have such a system?
I know all the videos are available on racingpost.com and ATR but the quality is poorish on my PC at least and the time it takes to go between sites and search for each one is a limiting factor.I think it is handy having your own archive and being able to jump straight to a video and save loading time and skipping forward and back with out any buffering. I expect that Veitch has someone working for him to make the archive otherwise it starts to eat up your time. I think it’s easier to pay for the RP archive and use ATR free unless you’re in a positition to afford paying someone or have a parnter of some sort that can do the archiving.
Dont think the actual process of doing it would be difficult at all. Its doing it every day, day in day out or having a team that could be depended on to do it each day that would be the difficult part imo.
Dont know if dual layer DVD recorders for TV are available but a single layer DVD should hold 2 hours of broadcast at TV quality which would cover most days (might have to use 2 DVD’s some days) if you recorded the racing review on RUK each evening or ATR the following morning. After that its just a matter of transferring the DVD files onto the hard drive of the PC and your away.
The process definately would not be difficult Cav your right, like you say it’s the day in day out process, i started creating an archive for a while recording videos via Real Player from RUK and ATR but it gets a bit much and started eating away at my space. Times a vital commodity in this game and it would probably require actually using someone to keep the archive up to date for you I imagine, unless your hermit and you sleep 4 hours a day, then it’s no problem
If you have a mate who’s into the same sort of stuff you could alternate days – one study form one day and the other do the recording. End of each day e-mail the video’s to each other (if the files aren’t too huge).
Don’t know about transferring them to a PC, but I have a Panasonic 400 GB DVD recorder (think you can get similar ones for around £300 these days) and use it to record every Flat race; it’s just a question of doing the recording from the replay programmes each day, and then spending about ten minutes per day creating chapters to divide each meeting (I don’t create chapters at every race as that would be too time consuming), and naming the meetings. It’s then possible to access any race within about 20 seconds.
It’s usually possible to get between four months and about eight months worth of Flat racing on the HD, depending on recording mode; at the moment I have all this year’s Flat racing since Jan 1, plus last year’s Flat turf from late July onwards; my HD is nearly full and soon it will be time to delete January and maybe February’s all-weather stuff, and July/August from last season’s Flat turf.
Obviously, National Hunt meetings take up much more of the HD and I tend only to record the better class ones.
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In reality, Carv, it’s not difficult at all.
The Win-TV package offered by Hauppage allows you to plug your television aerial or SKY box into your PC and view/record a number of channels simultaneously. Races can be recorded individually, immediately named and filed, and a reference created in a (simple) database which opens the requested video almost instantly.
The one drawback is the need for memory, as five years of racing is going to take up a lot of space, but other than that you can have an effective ‘operation’ up and running within a couple of hours.
I think some of these writers move into a fantasy world.
How many times would you watch a flat racing video of 5 years ago, even 2 years ago? – for information purposes – none.
Anyone following racing full time knows most of the current horses/ jockeys/trainers quirks and capabilities and watching a "random" video without any other context is a pure waste of time. Something the racing channels use to fill in air time.
If he had advised to watch the video – extract and record any useful information within the race context then delete it, it would make more practical sense.I’m saying this because I came to the conclusion after indexing a similar archive then never really ever using it once. So I now extract anything useful, record it to database then delete/ chuck. There is not too much of the horseracing past that is relevant. The Racing Post is running an advert which relates to this.
Thanks for the replies- may well investigate the package Equitrack flags up. You are largely right Robert- I took the five year figure from the Veitch book but in reality you’d be using the previous month or two 90% of the time. It would be sufficient to keep a year for nearly all I’d want to do.
Like everything else in this game, it’s all about time- I just resent how long it takes me to look at 5 or 6 videos at the moment and how poor the quality is.
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