Tyrant

Adam, are you actually traveling now for GCI? If so, where in St. Louis do you stay? I live in St. Louis when I am not at school, about 10 minutes from the park. It would be pretty cool to meet up with you. In January I am headed out to Baltimore, MD to start an 8-month long co-op with Premier Rides, so it would be cool to talk to someone who has already done an internship in the Amusement Park Industry.

We don't have people who do that.... In fact we have tons of signs saying that Six Flags is not responsible if your items are lost, for the longest time if someone handed us something, we would have to say "we aren't responsible for your items just to let you know". Most people seem to trust us though, I have never really encountered any problems with people getting things stolen from the docks though, everyone is pretty courteous when it comes to that.

At least this isn't a chain-wide thing. In fact at SFSTL we recently just installed bins similar to Holiday World. On Eagle there is a "cubby wall" that is similar to the cubbies you see in elementary school, it works really well instead of the bins which stuff gets spilled on all the time. At Batman they use a cabinet thing similar to Voyage where the ops will slide the doors around based on the train that is out on the track. Freeze has always used individual baskets on the transfer table. Ninja, Mine Train, and Boss I believe will be getting new bins as well. No more of those ugly blue tupperware bins.

We always run two trains when possible. On the weekends we staff Freeze so that we can start off running two trains immeditatly. However as I stated earlier one side of Freeze was shutdown on saturday because of a part that needed to be replaced on the transfer table, which is an 8-hour job and needs to be done when the ride is shutdown. We had one minor shutdown for about an hour or so on saturday as well which didn't help the line too much. The typical wait for Freeze on two trains on a saturday like yesterday would have been 30-45 minutes. When we have two trains going, we can launch trains like clockwork, the Freeze crew this year is very good. So with the cooperation of guests, we can almost 90% of the time have a train ready for launching once the other train comes back into the station to do a synchronized switch. Also for anyone preparing to ride, do NOT bring change onto the ride hoping to see "weightlessness". If we catch you with change in your hands we will kick you off. There have been several times where someone in the booth sees someone trying to pull change out of their pockets when we are sliding the table over, we will stop the table, bring it back, and kick you off. We take the change policy very seriously, as people can get hurt badly esspically since Thunder River and its loading dock is so close to the top-hat and spike.

Regarding Freeze, we were indeed running only one train the entire day since the other transfer table needed to have a wheel replaced, and that alone is an 8 hour job. So our mechanics waited untill the park closed and pulled an all-nighter to get it done. We did go searching for the "this ride will be running at reduced capacity" sign but couldn't find it anywhere since most all of the signs have been remade this year. Instead we posted an employee out at the front of the gate to let guests know we were only running one train due to technical difficulities. Early in the day though the line almost never left the station, wasn't untill after 1pm or so the line blew up. Glad you enjoyed your day though, I was working at Freeze (obviously) till about 2pm, then the rest of the night till around 5-ish was videotaping for our employee department training video. So if you saw an employee wandering around with a camera, that was me.

I have been using a cheaper Canon Elura 100 for the past few months (around $350 I believe). And I have been blown away by its quality. The low-light leaves more to be desiered, but that is going to be a persistant problem in any low-end camcorder. However for the price I cannot complain at all as the image quality is outstanding. You can check out some of my videos in the Amatuer Videographer forum to see some examples of the quality. As for HD, at this point I wouldn't bother if you are planning on doing web-videos, but if you want something to really enjoy at home, or for much higher production values, then I guess if you want to fork over the price, go for it. At this point my miniDV still shoots at 720x480 and looks beautiful.

^ I'll second that. That was the only time I ever got off not wanting to get back on. As I was seriously hurting after that. However in any other row its an incredible ride and I still would never pass it up.... just don't ride row 3....

Premier Rides uses Solidworks for the mechanical side of design, as for the track design itself it is very mathematics intensive (3d parametric equations out the ass) in which every company approaches it a different way. Some just outsource the dynamics and statics calculations to be done by a vendor such as Stengel, while some do it in-house such as Moher Sohne in which they have their own software (check out XTRAC). Some companies use a more numbers-based visualization system such as spreadsheets (which I prefer) while others will use a much more visual approach such as the XTRAC software. As for the NoLimits software and such, that is still used but mostly for "blue-sky" stuff, imagining up layouts and doing quick testing to see if it would work, whether clearences seem good, and if it is exciting. The engineering work is completely different.

You are more likely right then. Just browsing through several film sites gave me the terms that I was using.

Well, when I do shooting, I consider A-Roll footage being primary things, like the ride itself, while B-Roll stuff being the "filler". Not just "offical" stuff from the parks themselves.

I'll start off by saying I am not exactly sure whether to place this in this forum or in the videographer one, sooo, feel free to move it if it is in the wrong one. Anyways, I was just wondering what Coaster and park videos some of you out there think are the "technically" best. What I mean by that is videos that have exceptional editing, camera angles, audio, etc. I think it'll be interesting to see how many post their faves being the techno-track ones, or the TPR style kind. Post what your faves are and why, I'll start off by saying that I think one of the best I have seen is Robb's Hades video, excellent mix of interesting angles, music, and B-roll footage.

*EDIT* Didn't even notice the 3 other pages of comments Already been explained well.

Anyone here do Whitewater Kayaking? I recently got into it (within the past year or so) and I am completly hooked. So much fun.

Any screens of Kanonens Accelerometer data? I would love to take a look at that.

The ride indeed is excellent. Great photos of the ride. I just thought I would post a link to this video I made, I spent about 4 hours editing it. Starting immediatly once I got back into Rolla from the park. (This is MConte05 from the sfstl.net boards btw) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4287607223726916470 Enjoy!