G&C Nets - The Videos

I've edited some of the videos now and uploaded a few of mine to you tube. It takes ages to upload these clips as the file sizes are in excess of 100mb and they're only a few seconds long - Don't know why that is? It also seems that the editing process makes the file sizes much larger even though I'm only using very short clips of the videos?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAPkSkB_KFY Leg Break

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNUtlN7wGY4 Wrong Un

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7EIDvehGTE The Gipper

If the Wizard is looking for clips, none of the clips I got were that good and a lot of them you had people walk in front of the camera just as you were bowling. I got one or two of Wayne as well and some of Neil batting. The thing is for some reason I don't understand - the process of editing them and making them shorter and cutting all the crap out increases the physical file sizes. It ends up for instance that a 4 second bowling sequence is 120MB in size. So I'm fast running out of youtube space and harddrive space. I reckon they're useful things to have and look at especially if you edit them in http://www.virtualdub.org/ and slow them down to slow motion clips of 5 or 6 FPS. So if you're interested in doing that I might look at whether it's better to save the original capture files or edit your clips and then burn them to either a CD or a DVD and perhaps come to some arrangement (remuneration) as it takes ages to do it all and every time I take the camera I run the risk of it being smashed to bits! I'll have to look at how easy it is to do all of this and the logistics. If you are interested you'll have to let me know and I'll keep your files till I've got a disc worth.

Other Cricket Stuff

While my Older son Ben was doing his Karate today Joe and me snuck into an empty Badminton bay and did some throwing, fielding and catching practice. Later on in between swimming sessions we also practiced batting as well and I noted that Joe was using a technique (the 9-9-9) technique he was taught last week at Basildon and Pitsea CC. I was quite impressed with that. Also all day today I've been working on their fielding positions with them as they've been instructed to learn at least 3 fielding positions. So I've made a pitch with a bit of string and then placed a couple of markers for the bat and bowler and then made some plastic tokens with the fielding positions written on them. All day on and off when we've done things like have a cup of tea in order that they can have biscuits they've had to place the tokens on the pitch in the relevant places. Initially I was only looking for them to know 4, but Joe really went for it and saw it as a real challenge where he could get one over his older brother and Joe by about the 7th attempt had all 11 placings! Ben then saw that the guanlet had been thrown down and he learned them all. So by the end of the day both of them seemed to be able to name the key 11 fielding positions they'd been given diagrams for in any order in any sequence. It probably helped that when me and Joe had been doing our catching drills Joe was having to run to the positions I was calling out.
It'll be interesting to see if they can do the same tomorrow?

Here's the image the next day with Joe just finishing the placings off by putting down the position for 3rd man. It's a little confusing as different resources give slightly different indications as to where the positions actually are. For the most part I err towards the placements as indicated by this diagram found on the internet at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket#Fielding This is pretty much the same as the fielding positions as indicated in Simon Hughes book Jargon Busting - Mastering the art of cricket. This book in particular makes it clear that the positions offer some level of flexibility and that they're not universally rigid in their positioning.