DVDRhelp's regular video competition, Interested ?

[Craig Tucker]

As many of you may know TGPO has come up with the idea of DVDRhelp running a regular video competion, there is a thread discussing the possibility here.

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=166029

It would be useful for us to know how many of you would be interested in entering the competition, and on how regular a basis. Also whether you feel you have a fast enough connection to upload your movie or whether you would prefer to mail it to one of us on a CD.

At the moment the wheels seem to be in motion and it would appear that this may well happen, there is even talk of prizes for the best films, so lets have your votes.

[vitualis]

You'd better believe that the wheels are in motion!

I think that a regular short film competition will be awesome. More info will come when we've finalised some of the details...

Regards.

[tgpo]

I'll be judging, but I'll also be entering videos every now and then.

[mkelley]

I think it would be a lot of fun to participate -- although I'm not much for "contests" when it comes to creating art (I much prefer the art to speak for itself) anything that allows for a forum for these things to be seen is pretty cool.

But sending a CD -- yuck! Because I do all my banking online (and only email my friends and family) I can't tell you the last time I bought a stamp. Please allow for uploading (obviously DSL uploading is slower than downloading, but it should be acceptable assuming you limit both the length and pixel size of the entries).

[racer-x]

I think It's a great idea. It gives us a chance to show off our talent. But let's make the video clips short, so that those of us that have dail-up can upload them. I've got a nice little clip (20 sec.) I'd like to upload. It's in MPEG-1 and it's about 4 MB.

[Cecilio]

but what kind of videos like home videos, or any source, just as long as someone gets the bestest video quality?

[Cecilio]

i download at 300 but upload at about 30 max lol that sucks.

[housepig]

but what kind of videos like home videos, or any source, just as long as someone gets the bestest video quality?

did you read the thread that was linked in the first post?

this is a competition for short films that users here have made.

[tgpo]

i download at 300 but upload at about 30 max lol that sucks.

I too can only upload at 30. So on long uploads I just leave it up all night.

[Machine514]

I think that this is a great idea. I would probably only be able to do it once every 2 months or so. This would open up many possibilities for advancement for all. Let's do it!

-Machine

[rude_skankin]

Why not have the option for both uploading, or if your connection sucks like mine (I share 128k with a small village) you can mail in a CD. Just a thought.

Anthony

[txpharoah]

Many of us have legal constraints.

[tgpo]

Many of us have legal constraints.

Like what??

[vitualis]

Okay, the upload option seems quite popular...

One of the things is we would like the video clips for entry to be of reasonable quality... We are thinking of a max. file size of approx 20 MB at present -- but we may allow for it even bigger (not a problem if entry is by CD only)...

Also, we are going to restrict the video clip to specific framesizes and other specs so that judging is going to be fair so you can't just send any old clip in...

What we could probably do is, there being two options for entry. One is to mail me a CD. The second is for you to UPLOAD to YOUR OWN WEBSPACE and then send me the URL so that I can download it.

Regards.

[mkelley]

Many of us have legal constraints.

Like what??

He may be talking about his work belonging to his employer -- some of my employees have wondered about that themselves (but I would never restrict them -- heck, it would be great to see their work here).

I'd be more worried about music rights -- we use a lot of ASCAP stuff but we play the royalties for our distribution disks. Not sure what problems it might cause to use the music in web videos not otherwise intended for profit: but we can always submit things without the music (it just loses about 50% of it's appeal, though).

[mkelley]

What we could probably do is, there being two options for entry. One is to mail me a CD. The second is for you to UPLOAD to YOUR OWN WEBSPACE and then send me the URL so that I can download it.
.

As long as we didn't have to leave it up on our site for too long -- I have enough web space to use as a "holding" bin but wouldn't want to tie it up for more than a week.

Sounds cool, though have nothing to send right now...

[The village idiot]

I only scanned this thread, so if this idea has been mentioned please forgive me.


Would someplace like I-films be willing to host all the movies?

[vitualis]

The long term hosting of video files isn't so much of a problem -- that's obviously up to the author/producer themselves...

However, we are trying to work out exactly how the video files are to be submitted. At the moment, we are thinking of a max. file size of 20 or maybe 40 MB (I think 40 MB would be cool as it would allow for some very reasonable quality video clips even of 5 min length at the framesize we are thinking of).

From a judging point of view, it is probably the most efficient and reliable for ONE person (I've volunteered) to collect all the submissions and then distribute to all the other judges (basically via one or two CD-R each).

In terms of how you are going to get the short film to me, post would be preferrable (less work on my part), but as long as you can upload to the web somewhere (it doesn't have to be there long -- only long enough so that I can download it) then I can get it that way too...

Regards.

[tgpo]

Would someplace like I-films be willing to host all the movies?

From what I've seen on their site
1. It costs money. So we'de have to work out something to where it was a much lower price or free

2. They only seem to have Real Media files. And I refuse to install Real on my computer.....to many problems in the past. I prefer quicktime.

[Thought Copper]

Oh boy ... why wouldn't anyone want to watch silly mindless performances by teenagers, shaky blurry camera movements, overexposure/underexposure, meaningless and outright cliched plots, cheezed up with inappropriate special effects and boring generic music. Who wouldn't want to see this?!

I'm sure it's definitely worth the extra load on Baldrick's webtraffic/webspace. I'm sure Baldrick has something substantial to gain from these amateur videos ... but for some reason I just can't think of what that is. Surely, this site won't lose any legitimacy and seriousness by hosting these space hogging dorky videos. Surely not.

Sarcasm aside,

I'd rather see someone post a noisy video clip and have a contest to see who can clean it up the best with filters, deinterlacing techniques and etc. At least this type of contest would seem more related to the purpose of this site. And who on this site wouldn't want to learn how to clean up videos before burning it to digital media and to showcase video cleaning-deinterlacing skills that we (as amateurs using freeware) can more likely master.

Put it another way, if we wanted to see good videos/movies, we'd go to the video store to see professional works done by experts of screenwriting, acting, and cinematography. Heck, didn't Tarentino learn directing by watching videos at his place of work, the video store? I come to dvdrhelp.com to learn encoding/filtering/deinterlacing techniques with different software, not to try to stuff my resume by trying to win some amateur video contest so I can apply to film school and hope they fall for it (I'm sure there are other sites for those purposes, none of which I care about).

[The village idiot]

OK, how about Usenet for the downloadable delivery service. At least for those that can upload. Even on a crappy connection like dial up, 20-40 MB might be possible. Just hijack one of the un-used binaries groups, or create a new binaries group, or maybe even use one that is already made for this type of thing. There are so many groups, it only seems logical that there is one for this type of thing. Most people that have highspeed connections already have a server that they could use. Or an outside service provider can be as little as $10 USD, and those offer better service than your ISP. If this sounds viable, and people need to know how to use Usenet, I would be more than happy to help them get going.

[vitualis]

@ Thought Copper: no one is asking for you to participate...

Why are there short film competitions/festivals all over the world? Because, there are actually some people out there with quite a bit of talent and they make some good stuff outside of the mainstream. If the only videos you see are at your video store, I truly feel sorry for you...

As to the "purpose" of this site, perhaps someone who has at present only 4 posts to his name should consider why a number of moderators on this site are excited in getting this underway.

Regards.

[tgpo]

As to the "purpose" of this site, perhaps someone who has at present only 4 posts to his name should consider why a number of moderators on this site are excited in getting this underway.

I'm extremely excited to see what we cam do with this. I think of it as a way to get others and myself a little more exposure with our work.

[thefox149]

This sounds like a great idea I have heaps of music video clips thta I have made for my own tracks.....bring it on.... mail or upload as long as they get to the judges what does it matter

[Nitemare]

I'd be interested if I had a high speed internet connection. There are no internet cafe's in my area. Sure, I could mail in a submission but I'd still have to download the movies to view them.

In the other thread someone mentioned a bandwidth issue and suggested limiting the downloads of movies to the top three selected by the judges. In my opinion this is a bad idea. If I entered something like this, or even if I didn't and I was just curious, I'd want to see all of the clips.

Of course I'm a dial-up user so I couldn't view them all anyway... unless the contest was held quarterly. Then I'd have three months to see as many of the submissions as I could download in that time. Otherwise it's a great idea that I couldn't participate in.

[vitualis]

After the submission of all the clips and we have made our comments, allocated winners, etc., we plan to create a CD-ROM disc of all the video clips and our comments for sale (probably $US5 + postage) to the public.

I expect that we'll give the prize winners of the comp a copy of the disc for free.

Regards.

[energy80s]

Would it not make more sense to upload clip of projects we are working on? I know of no project under 5 mins and that will take a lot of webspace to achieve decent DVD quality.

Also, who the hell has the time to get projects ready for this website anyway? Unless this is a one off deal.

[tgpo]

Also, who the hell has the time to get projects ready for this website anyway? Unless this is a one off deal.

I play on making them over the weekends.

And the 5min limit, If you can't get your point accross in 5min, the perhaps you should rethink your original idea. Most screenplays say that by the first page/minute the audience should have a feel on what the movie will be like and at the most by page 3 know what the story will be about.

[vitualis]

Perhaps people still don't understand the concept of short film.

We don't expect to you to be compressing a classical Greek epic into 5 minutes. It is a short film.

There are many short film competitions around the world. The largest one is held in Sydney, the annual Tropicana short film festival. I think it has a limit of 7 minutes -- and most films were shorter than that -- and the short-listed clips were AWESOME.

Regards.