Otakon AMV Contest

hackerzc · Post by **hackerzc** » Wed May 31, 2006 5:32 pm

We don't mind at all if you've sent a video to a bunch of other cons, we just don't want people submitting videos to the contest that have already won in other contests.
Mind you this is purly honor system based as there is no easy way to go through and check every single entry for previous wins ahead of time.

The prescreenings (which run much closer to the convention) are like a gauntlet each entry has to go through. AMV fans and creators go to these things, and with those many people you have a large knowledge base. If a video has won anything in the past or even since the deadline for the contest, people will say something to us and then we look at that video more closely.

My personal stance is that as long as you have not won any awards at the time of you sending us your entry, I'm fine with letting it compete (even if you win an award before the convention). But making this kind of call falls on the director.
Even if an entry gets DQ'd for this reason it is still shown at the con, just not in the contest.
To be honest I never remember this being much of an issue as everyone seems to follow this rule very well.

Oh and for anyone curious, the contest staff has talked about it... and next year there will be changes to the contest deadline as well as a few other rules and things.
We won't be getting into really serious conversation about this until after the convention however.
What I feel confident to divulge now though, is that we are switching over to DVD spec for everything except the contest screening. So don't be surprised if you see the format requirements change next year.

MousePotato · Post by **MousePotato** » Wed May 31, 2006 6:05 pm

does this mean that I can encode in anamorphic?

hackerzc · Post by **hackerzc** » Wed May 31, 2006 8:00 pm

Black Sun Productions wrote:does this mean that I can encode in anamorphic?

This is something I have to look into further as I have not really played around with anamorphic widescreen much.
For playback from the DVD it should work perfectly, however when put through a netstream 2000 the image is not scaled and retains it's 4:3 aspect.

Then there is the issue of mixing anamorphic and non anamorphic videos. Again, something I have yet to experiment with or learn about to any useful extent.

These are all things for next year however.... so there is time.

MousePotato · Post by **MousePotato** » Wed May 31, 2006 11:44 pm

hehe. I was just kidding. Considering that you probably project the videos at 4:3, an anamorphic video played back through a dvd player at 4:3 would just upvert it to that ratio. Making it pointless when you could just avoid that process all together.

sry. bad joke.

hackerzc · Post by **hackerzc** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 4:36 pm

Yeah just adding black bars and keeping everything 4:3 would make it easier... but easier is not always better (then again, hard is not always better either)... hmm, I'm very confused now.

ANY WAY... even though I knew you were just kidding you did bring up a good point, and it IS something worth investigating. I'll have lots of time to play around with it after the con. I'm far to unimportant to have anything else to do