ZeWrestler and Iserlohn's Guide to Opinions - Part 3 What Each Category Means  In a nutshell, this is what each category means. Originality: Basically, all you have to say about this is how often you see the idea. DBZ fighting videos will normally get low scores because who hasn't seen a DBZ fighting video. A video done to an anime that isn't shown to often or a video is a brand new concept that you haven't seen before should get higher points here. One example is the Senshi On Springer. Also if the scenes are really, really random, that means the creator did not put much thought into the video and should not get high originality points Capture/Output Quality: You do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure how to score this category out. To put it in Leman's terms for you, if the video images are so bad that you can't tell if you are watching Pokemon or Trigun, the Capture Quality is low. :P If the quality is sharp enough for you to see every hair on the head of Homer Simpson, it must be higher. There are other factors that would be included when looking at Capture/Output Quality. If there is a "www.dragonballz.de" on the bottom of the screen or some other kind of watermark, you take off some points. Compression artifacts are to be judged with a grain of salt. Sometimes the edited copy or video sent to a con will look amazing, but the online copy will be degraded due to space restrictions. Mark at your own risk.  Sound Quality: If it sounds like the song or what ever came was recorded from the radio (it's a big hint if you hear the radio announcer speak) then the quality is not that good. If there are echoes and static, quality is low. If it sounds like you are playing a CD, then it has good quality.  Action / Editing Sync: Believe it or not, this category is not as easy as it sounds and is in fact quite tricky to grade properly. First and foremost, this should not be judged simply on "is there action." The question to ask is "Does the action match the music?" This is the place to look at the pacing of the video, whether or not clips occur on time (if the lyric is "Somewhere over the rainbow" and the clip doesn't change to a rainbow until "bow" you have a problem.) Again, pacing tends to play very heavily into this rating. Lip Sync: I think Phade says this one best. 10 = Makes Milli Vanilli jealous and 1=Looks like a dubbed Kung Fu movie. Digital Effects: This category is sometimes a hard one to grade. It does not mean use as many effects as you can. I know premier makes you feel like a 5 year old boy with a serious sweet tooth. But that does not mean you have to use every single one. It will detract from the video, giving you a worse score. (Not good) What you look at here is not how many effects were, but how they were used, and the effectiveness of how they were used. Another question worth asking is "can this be done without a computer?" If it's all fades, give an N/A - a computer is unnecessary. Likewise, if every cut in this video is a fade, give a low score instead - it's an annoyance to the video and it's clear that someone's trying to cover up bad cuts. Effort: A friend of mine once said that he could spend 60 hours on a video, and accomplish nothing, or two hours on a video and finish the majority of it. Both of these cases should not have an effect on the effort score. However, if someone says on their site that they spent 18 hours making this video and it looks like crap, dock 'em for it - chances are if they invested extra time they would've done a better job. Also, if someone openly states that this is their first video, give them a +1 on this for having the courage to display their first work. Re-Viewable: This is pretty straightforward. Do you want to watch this video again (other than for catching things you missed on the first pass for the opinion)? Phade didn't use the best markers for this in his descriptions so our advice: 5 means you want to keep the video (if nothing else.) 4 means you saw the video, opinioned it, and got rid of it. 1-3 and 6-10 are OK as is. Overall: Overall is where, more than any of the other categories, you just have to go with what you feel this video is on a 1 to 10 scale. When everything is weighed in your mind, what does this video deserve? Do the bad things get outweighed by the very good? Do the wondrous effects not make up for the flawed concept and lack of substance? Whatever you think this video is worth is what this score is. You can't put it more simple than that. For what it does, this video is a..... Part 4: Useless Opinions Index