Virtualmeet.net

MODERATOR'S NOTE: This thread is for discussing the upcoming meet, pre-registrations go here (http://virtualmeet.net/community/forum/meet-talk/40/0/).

jealous of the outdoor meet...I think I need to make myself a home gym and then I won't be jealous...but the midwest isn't going to do it!

Oh and depending on where I am at...I might do this meet.  I will have to look further into the crystal ball and see what the future holds! LOL!

I'm in. I can't get to the rules though. I assume from watching the promo from Feb that I'm going to need a camera.  8)

Yeah, most any digital camera will do, as long as it takes video. With sound preferable, but not in any way necessary. Digital, because the clips need to be sent to the server.

About picture quality; as long as the judges can tell it's you and see the details of the lift (as per the rules), it's good.
At the first meet, we (Kris and I) used my dv-camera, which basically was a little bit of overkill on our part...  (the clips were 12MB or so, each) 8) Edit: I meant to say 120MB each, thanks Kris!

As an example, a Canon Powershot is as good as you'll need, with 320 resolution on the video. Hope that helped...  ;D

This is starting to look very good. As of right now, we have nine lifters (including our first female contestant, bravo Christine (http://virtualmeet.net/christine/)!!!) and one judge signed up. Six countries (Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Puerto Rico and The United States) are represented. I know for a fact that there are many more interested people out there, but whether any of them will grab the barbell for this meet remains to be seen. Two more judges should suffice unless there is a sudden explosion of participants. Anyone?

It's also great to see the playing field becoming broader with the sign up of a few experienced lifters; the rankings are sure to become remodeled as a source of inspiration for the rest of us! My highest wish for Virtualmeet.net is that it can become a place where lifters of all calibers can rub shoulders together in a positive atmosphere... looking good so far.  ;D

Nine weeks out, time to get serious!

Ryan, could you expound on this?


That's perfectly OK. Sound is not required. That said, is the problem related to the camera not being able to capture sound or something else?

MY BEST COMP BENCH


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2wU-nWcM5o

Hi Ryan.  I watched all your videos on Youtube.  You're an awesome lifter.

That is some strong benching there. What kind of bodyweight are you running at?

Finally got around to it myself after having been abroad over the weekend. Downloading it over GPRS was a pain, but well worth it! I third what has been said above, strong benching indeed. Out of interest, what shirt are you using?

thanx hbriem for youre comments i tried 680 but it rolled away from my left hand and i told the spotters to take it.


kris i use a dbl ply phenom shirt, open back, reinforced neck and velcro. but i am trying to sell it right now.  switchint to a METAL VIKING PRO BENCH shirt.

We just made 15 participants! Best of all, with Emmie (http://virtualmeet.net/emmie/) and Jen (http://virtualmeet.net/conlin19/) now signed up, Christine (http://virtualmeet.net/christine/) is no longer alone on the women's side of the fence. This is starting to look REALLY good now.

Eight days left (http://virtualmeet.net/community/forum/announcements/73/0/) to sign up for the meet!

oh hell yeah! it's on sister :p

( MODERATOR'S NOTE: Moved from pre-registration thread, inserted quote for context. )

It is meet morning here in Vaasa, Finland with the mercury clocking in at 3'C/37.4'F. The weather forecast promises dry weather and a day temperature of about 14'C/57.2'F, so we are very much set to get into our shorts and turn up the volume!

The meet has been well underway for some time already with the Friday group doing their thing yesterday; two of the lifters have already submitted their video. Christian Burger (http://virtualmeet.net/burgerc/) in Austria had the honor to be the lifter to open the meet.

Time to get some food into the system, pulled 2kg/4.4lbs of weight for this meet and refueling is high of the agenda before we hit the bar in the afternoon. For those of you lifting today, have a good one!!!!!

The day after... a ruthless meet for me, but under the circumstances very happy with what I got (no victory dance before the judging though). By way of update, 7 out of 12 lifters have now submitted their lifts. By Tuesday, all footage should be in the hands of the judges. Stay tuned.

Editing down mine, Emmie's and Jen's videos now, should have them to you by this evening...day of crappy lifting for me, felt like we had extra gravity in the gym or something :p Either way, tons of fun on an early Saturday morning!

Editing is fine if you have long clips, just make sure to avoid or go easy on compression unless the clips are huge (straight out of a DV camera they can easily be 100MB plus) or you are on a slow connection. The server has about 30GB of free space for uploads at the moment plus all files are compressed as Flash Video for the judges on the server, so if it makes things easier at your end, feel warmly welcome to just upload the raw footage. Really looking forward to seeing your lifts and catch a glimpse of Primal Fitness. The graffiti and all specialty equipment for parkour and what not makes it look more than a tad different from your ordinary gym...

I agree with Jesse. I felt like the air was thick or some strange thing like that. Still I had a great time with it. Jesse is the MAN for doing all the vid for us. Thanks!

Altogether the meet was a very good experience for me. Not the least, because it showed me where to improve and on what to focus for the next training period. After all, after the meet means before the next meet.
On my first squat attempt I was more focused if I got the camera right then on the depth. In general I need to work on getting a better feel for my squat depth.
I underestimated how beat up I would be when time came to DL.

Looking forward to see everybodys performance and the judging.

I know exactly what you are talking about.  I usually face the mirror I have in my gym, but to be able to have the right camera angle I had to turn myself around and couldn't see myself squat.  This is definitely something I need to work on, knowing when I hit depth without seeing it.  Plus like someone else had mentioned I think gravity had increased the day I lifted, lol.  Knowing that you are going to be judged for your lifts and watching yourself on video lift really brings out those areas where you say, "man, I can't believe I did that". 

I still feel really embarrassed about my squat performance, but I guess that gives me something to improve on.   Knowing people are watching those videos almost makes me want to crawl in a hole.

Also want to say congrats to everyone that competed and can't wait until the next meet.  It's really awesome to be able to lift with people you otherwise wouldn't be able to meet or lift with in person.

A quick update: 1.4 gigabytes of meet video is now being compressed and prepared for handing over to the judges. I am still missing the lifter info for one lifter, but that should be taken care of shortly. It is after midnight here in Finland now, so the judges will have to wait until sometime tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone for doing a stellar job with the video taping (good angles folks!), file naming etc. Plenty of exciting material, can't wait to share it with you... but first things first.  ;D

The meet with its 105 video clips have now been passed on to the three judges! The goal is to have the judging phase finished within one week from now, i.e. September 22nd.

Last meet was not automated in any way: judges downloaded several hundred megabytes of raw clips and handed back scoresheets based on which I calculated final scores, rankings and so on (a painful experience even with only five lifters). For this meet, the submitted video clips have been converted to Flash Video on the server with all the lift data simultaneously being pulled into a database (hence the complicated file naming scheme). All submitted video and lift data were then written out to a series of web pages that unfold round by round in the same sequence as a real meet: three rounds on the squat, bench and deadlift, with each round going from the lightest bar weight to the heaviest, and men and women lifting in the same round. The judges can only review one round at a time and cannot go back once they have judged a round (much like in a real meet).

Once all judges have finished, the final results and rankings will be collated by a script. Meanwhile, I have added a counter to the forum main index (http://virtualmeet.net/community/forum/) that updates every few minutes with information on how the judging progresses. The final videos are still likely to be hand-edited for this meet, so expect it to take at least a few days after the judging has been finished before the final results are out. Things will continue to speed up as the meet software evolves, for now please bare with me. The next meet(s) will be announced as soon as the results are out.

If anyone has any questions at this point, shoot!

The counter has stopped. Stinn (http://virtualmeet.net/stinn/), Ryan (http://virtualmeet.net/rigdon/) and Tim (http://virtualmeet.net/vanhalen/) did a very efficient job doing their bit over the weekend. Thanks guys!!!

I for my part will now push forward with preparing the meet for release, stay tuned.

I trust we (Kris and I) have had the best airconditioning available on the planet; i.e. we lifted at the outdoor gym in the woods in Vaasa... A cool video it shall be, let me tell you. Having had a sneaky preview (pre-hear actually) of the music, it'll be really cool... :)

This phase is now mostly done, saw the final collated results for the first time yesterday. The reason this is taking some time is that I am writing the scripts to automate this as I go, once they are done this phase will be reduced to a matter of minutes. I am also down with either a bout of food poisoning or stomach flu, so things are progressing in small bouts at the moment. Hopefully, the result with video will be out sometime next week.

Thanks for the efforts. It is much appreciated.

Definitely thanks a ton! As much work as handling videos can be on our end, I can't even imagine stepping up and taking care of so much footage at one time!

The meet will be released tomorrow Sunday. Those of you who plan to watch the whole thing, prepare your munchies!  ;D

Three weeks after the fact, the meet has been released (http://virtualmeet.net/meets/200709pl/) and the rankings (http://virtualmeet.net/rankings/) updated!

As usual, the edited meet video can be grabbed either from Virtualmeet.net (http://virtualmeet.net/community/promote/#video) or via YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYDwxWoL8HI), the main difference being a higher sound and video quality of the Virtualmeet.net one.

Let the discussion commence! I will probably have more to say about this meet, but for now I need some R&R from the plenty of work it took to get this out for you. Thanks again to all lifters and, especially the judges, for taking part in this meet!

Awesome Kris!

Thanks for all your hard work Kris.  The system you have put together is really unique.

Kris, I didn't know how you would outdo yourself from the last meet but you did.  I especially like the inclusion of why it was thought the lift failed if any of the judgements were red-lighted.  A big thanks to you and the judges for a great meet.

Are you gonna post this on the Dr. Squat site like the last one?

I also wanted to send a shout out to the women who competed, and I hope they'll compete next time, too.

Excellent job Kris.  Props to you and the judges for some fine work.

Also, congrats to everyone who competed (ladies and gentlemen) this meet was really a lot of fun.  Hopefully everyone stays healthy and injury-free and decides to keep on competing in future meets.

Yes, that means everyone needs to get their butts over to the sign-up thread for the Military Bench Press and SIGN-UP  ;D

Again, hopefully everyone hit some nice PRs and had some fun in the process, I know I did (had fun of course  ;) )

Also wanted to add my thanks.  I may come in at the bottom of every ranking, but it gives me somewhere to go--UP! 

Fantastic job with the video and updating the web site.

Thanks again!

Good job everyone.
Aaron your Squats are scary deep. I would definetly need this kind of flexibility.

Congrats  for Jamie for winning and Matt for lifting the biggest number of the day ~230kg in the DL and everybody for taking part.

Things are beginning to return to normal at my end after dealing with all the other tasks I put on the backburner to get the meet out.

I know I may be repeating myself, but I want to extend one final big THANK YOU to all lifters. You all took the time to ensure good angles and light conditions (Alberto even challenged the sun successfully); this made it easy for the judges and I was spared the additional work of manually trying to lessen the impact of badly lit video. In fact, the only manual intervention I did was to fix a clip where the camera was suddenly turned from horizontal to vertical. The rest was taken care of by a script which generated all images with the lifter info, compressed the video, computed the results and so on; besides editing the meet video, I did not have to touch your videos at all. This solved the biggest bottle neck to being able to cater for big meets and really underscores the importance of the lifters submitting properly named and well-shot video. If I had to do 105 clips by hand combining lights and writing out lifter info, then generating them and converting to Flash video, you would still be waiting... so THANKS FOR A JOB WELL DONE EVERYONE!

The judges also did an excellent job. There was some minor disagreement between how deep is deep enough on the squat and what constitutes an adequate pause on the bench press, but that's what three judges are for.  ;D Having to bomb out a lifter is never a fun task, but Stinn, Ryan and Tim all kept their line to the end like it should be done. THANKS GUYS!

All lifters also showed a huge deal of sportmanship and integrity. The meet did not go very well for many, but all clips still made it to the server. I'm not sure how far Jamie is from when he exclusively did powerlifting, but I for one was very impressed by his machine-like lifting... very impressive form. Aaron played it very safe and gets the inofficial award for strictest form and most impressive squat depth; doesn't get you any extra points of course, but going deep on the squat is always impressive. Matt, Christine, Mike, Christian, Alberto and Måns all put in a good show; some of you played a risky game, but am impressed by your lifting even though I know many of you did not get what you set out to do for various reasons. That's what the next meet is for. ;D Last but not least, the Crossfit crew (Emmie, Jen and Jesse) has my fullest respect for being in such good shape (not to mention the positive atmosphere that shines through every clip). As you all know, these people specialize in hardcore overall fitness; I for one wonder how much less I would be squatting were I also biking, doing parkour and so on. Hopefully you three will consider a come-back in a future meet; the strength is definitively there, but got the impression that you may not have studied the rulebook so closely (I especially feel for Jen who did an awesome last pull, fast as lightning, after failing it on the second but then dropped it from straight arms).

Many of us are still inexperienced when it comes to meets, real or virtual, but no better way of becoming a better lifter than to learn from experience. I for one again learned a lesson regarding my low back having to lay off all squatting for three weeks prior to the meet to be able to come in at all. Will make a more gentle approach next time, period. Greed has a tendency to backfire, but try convincing your brain that.  ::)


Thanks! You will continue to see improvements over the next few meets. As I get things properly scripted the sky is the limit to what we can turn this into. One thing I'm especially missing is the ability to follow the score as the meet progresses like in a real meet.


Already did (http://drsquat.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=23218&sid=e0a9125ed0cd5b2df5a5d7304c6a0678#23218), just followed up in the old post (http://drsquat.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1893). Also submitted it to Powerlifting Watch (http://www.powerliftingwatch.com/node/6077). The meet is also popping up on various boards and blogs, I will be posting a few links tomorrow.


Couldn't second that more!

A few of the lifters have posted their own assessments of the meet on their blogs. Here's a few, feel free to add anything I may have missed. Very interesting reads!

• Alberto's very interesting and thoughtful analysis (http://zenprimer.blogspot.com/2007/09/results-from-virtual-meet-september-7.html)
• Mike published his own video with comments in an entry aptly titled Greed (http://anvilorhammer.wordpress.com/2007/09/08/greed/)
• Christine posted the video on her blog (http://liftlikeagirl.blogspot.com/2007/09/september-7-9th-2007-virtual.html)
• Jamie posted a quick note and put the video in the sidebar (http://www.celestialstudios.ca/~jjamie/wordpress/?p=295)