David Reutimann

David Reutimann testing at Infineon Raceway (with help from Chris Cook). Nice guy on a crazy schedule. I hope he learned something for the race in June.

Daytona

And thus endeth the 50th running of the Daytona 500. I had to watch the race by myself because Vicky is in SoCal visiting her sister and friends right now. Which sucked, but I still had a great time. More importantly, a couple of things were reconfirmed to me today:

• Screw the nay-sayers, screw the snobs. Screw anybody who is trying to make fun of people who watch NASCAR races. This is great entertainment, just as good as any Superbowl or Oscars telecast. 43 cars going 190mph, 2-3 wide, often with less space between them than a deck of cards. Yeah, they’re going around in circles. Yes, it takes a long time and there’s quite a few commercials – but you don’t have to give the race your undivided attention for the entire time. And most importantly, there’s always something going on: cars bumping. Cars spinning out. Big crashes. Big crashes in which the cars slide across the finish line. On their roof.

  On fire.

  I don’t have a problem with the low-tech approach of it all. The cars might not be aerodynamic technological marvels, but compared to your average Formula 1 race, this is pure entertainment – uninterrupted racing action that stays unpredictable until the very end instead of two lead changes during the entire race (which usually happen during pit stops, no less). Who cares if it’s very “All-American” and somewhat Rednecky. It’s FUN.

• I’ve grown way too accustomed to our DVR. Record the race, watch it with time delay, skip through the commercials. Yeah, that’s a great comfort feature, skipping through all those commercials, theoretically gaining some time – but it turns yu into a babysitter for the TV. Way too much attention required, you never feel like you can just walk away from the broadcast for a while. “Oh no, it went to commercials! Quick, gotta skip forward!”
  Well, today I just watched the live broadcast while working on a 3D model on the comptrer. There were a lot of commercials I couldn’t skip. I just didn’t worry about it It’s kinda sad, but figuring out this stupid little fact was liberating.

Looking forward to the rest of the season, and especially the Sears Point race in June. Not only will it be in our backyard, the cars will even turn right from time to time. Take that, nay-sayers!

IndyCar Test at Infineon Raceway

My latest video is now available for public view on the official Infineon Raceway website. IndyCar drivers Scott Dixon and Ryan Hunter-Reay visited the racetrack on December 6 and 7 to test for the new season, and I was there to document those two days.

Expect more of these kind of videos in the 2008 season. The Infineon Raceway staff are giving me great behind-the-scenes access, so the videos should turn out even nicer than the ones I already made this year. Go to my Youtube page to get your additional fix of IndyCar, NASCAR, Karting etc. at Sears Point

One of the necessary but unfortunate side effects of creating video for the web is the resolution. The movie is usually tiny and heavily compressed to account for bandwidth and dial-up users. So I thought it would be fun to post a few fullsize frames from the IRL Testing video posted recently.

As a sidenote, I’m still working fulltime on new game projects for our company. But you shouldn’t expect any announcements for quite a while, it’s still too early.

NCK Road Racing at Infineon Raceway

This is a music video that I created for Victoria’s dad and the Northern California Karters. Gokart racing around the big track at Infineon Raceway!

Inside Nextel Cup

Victoria and I have made a habbit of watching “Inside Nextel Cup” on the Speed channel every week. A little bit to recap the race. But mostly to watch the panel, and more specifically to see Michael Waltrip be his usual crazy self (and to see everybody else’s reactions).

Each week the panel answers a bunch of viewer-submitted questions, most of them kind of dull. So, being my usual self, I wanted to see what it takes to get a question on the program. I submitted one, not tied to a specific race, a few weeks ago – imagine our surprise when it actually came on tonight. Victoria got a kick out of it, and I’m getting a kick out of it. I’m not exactly defining myself by having my questions featured on a TV show (having people play my games and read/watch my stuff is a bit more rewarding), but it was fun to see nonetheless

The question was “Do crew chiefs ever get in the car themselves?” To be honest, I kinda knew the answer, but that wasn’t really important. I just thought that this one would be a good conversation starter. And it was. I uploaded the clip to Youtube, see below!

IndyCar 2007 Video

The finished Indy Car video is now on Youtube.

I played it much looser with this video, just throwing shots against the wall and seeing which ones got soaked up by the music and which ones didn’t seem to fit. The ending happens a bit quickly, but that’s okay I’m happy with the final routcome. I’ll post some frames from the HD version later.

NASCAR 2007 Video

I bought my Canon digital camcorder for many reasons, but the NASCAR race at Infineon was high on the list of stuff that I wanted to film. So when this year’s Toyota/Savemart 350 came around, I didn’t pull any punches. I visited the racetrack ahead of time to look at the preparations, camped out near my old apartment to film the arrival of the team trucks, hung out at the Speed stage for quite a while and aimed my lense at the garage area for such a long time that I had to sit out the next day because of a really bad sunburn. All in all, I filmed over 5 hours of video, and I had fun doing it.

Because of Lair crunch time and other projects it took me a while to edit all that footage into a movie, but it’s finally done (enough) to show to the world. So I proudly present my first Youtube video! NASCAR at Infineon Raceway – Matt’s documentary montage. I hope you enjoy it

As it naturally is with Youtube, the quality of the clip is very crappy. The source video is 1920×1080, but I had to render out a 320×240 version (which Youtube then compressed the hell out of). I’d post the full video, but can’t really do that for bandwidth reasons. To give you an idea of the quality difference, here’s two still frames of the “real” movie:

I’m pretty pleased with the outcome. Some of the shots are too shaky (and I didn’t bother stabilizing them in post), but I feel that the edit (and how it plays with the music) is professional quality. The camera just happened to be consumer I might do another video at a later point – with 5 hours of raw footage, I wasn’t able to put close to all the shots in this one video that I wanted to use.

Drag Racing!

We went to the FRAM Autolite NHRA Nationals in Sonoma today and shot some video. Most of the actual runs didn’t come out too well because the ground was shaking too much as the cars were running by But the burnouts worked out nicely. These cars create 7000(!) horsepower and cover a 1/4 mile distance (400 meters) in less than 5 seconds! That means accelerating to over 330mph (over 500 kilometers) and then braking back down per chute in less than 10 seconds. That’s pretty incredible once you really wrap your head around it.

Download video 1 (20mb) Right-click and “Save Target As”.
Download video 2 (10mb) Right-click and “Save Target As”.

Both videos are 1920×1080 resolution in WMV format. Beware, the videos are louder than your typical TV coverage! I watched the TV version afterwards and it was nice and all, but their sound never quite matches up to the real thing.

Toyota/Savemart 350

Of course Victoria, Michael (her dad) and I went to the NASCAR race this year. In fact, I recorded 5 hours(!) of video from that entire week, waiting to be edited into a mini documentary of the race and what it does to the Sonoma area.

I just haven’t found time yet to really dig into the video – but hey, here is one frame! I’m trying to get back to blogging regularly, there should be more on the race later.

AMA Superbike Race

Victoria and I went to the AMA Superbike race at Sears Point on Sunday. We spent a good 5 hours walking the track, sitting in the sun, and watching the races. Here’s some pictures from the winner’s circle!

I hadn’t followed the AMA circuit before going to the race, so I had to make sense first of who was who and why this or that matchup were intruiging. Spies? Mladin? Didn’t really ring a bell until I watched the SPEED coverage afterwards. But that’s what I love about living close to the racetrack: we get four major national events each year (AMA, NASCAR, NHRA and Indy), and it’s so easy to say “You know what? I bet that riding this track at over 100MPH – on motorcycles! – must be quite a sight to see. Let’s go, it’s not that expensive.” So we did. And we had a great time. And now I know a little bit more about the Superbike competition

I also recorded over 50 minutes of video on my camera. You can download a clip of Sunday’s Superbike start. It’s 18MB, DiVX encoded. The video is 1920×1080 resolution and pretty damn cool, but unfortunately the bikes ghost quite a bit. Too bad, but such are the restrictions of the HDV format.