2010 Anime Central AMV Contest Results

[SailorDeath]

Apparently I am too baller for ACen.

lulz

[marthwmaster]

What if the video starts in immediately, but has song info in the corner akin to a typical music video? Does that count as a bumper and thus, make it ineligible for the competition?

[NS]

Fixed mine, resubmitted.

[ngsilver]

What if the video starts in immediately, but has song info in the corner akin to a typical music video? Does that count as a bumper and thus, make it ineligible for the competition?

As the rule itself includes title screens, bumpers, and credits; generally your video would be DQ'ed based on that info being in the video. That is a form of credits and bumpers. To me this form of credits does not appear to be very creative or difficult to remove, but we may have to see it to be sure.


Castor: I may go in and make a revision to the system to change the field into a comments section. It was mainly designed to inform users of reasons for disqualification but has since been used for many other things so a re-defining of that field might be for the best.

[outlawed]

What if the video starts in immediately, but has song info in the corner akin to a typical music video? Does that count as a bumper and thus, make it ineligible for the competition?

>Entries may not contain bumpers, title screens, or credits. ACen staff will add uniform credits to all entries. Under some circumstances creator generated credits will be allowed if they are built into the video, a required part of it, and cannot be removed. This creative use of entrant embedded credits will be judged at our discretion.

That's the exact rule. Basically by creative use of entrant embedded credits I am talking about a situation something like this:
A rocket fires and is zoomed in on. A creator has added text with their stuio name to the rocket and it is tracking across the screen with it. In this case someone has gone to extreme measures to embed something in the video creatively. This situation is a bit different from taking your master copy of your AMV after you edit it and then adding an overlay titlecard over some part of the video. The more complex addition may have been done with specialized software during editing or in pre-production and would probably take extreme effort for them to remove it. We have seen more videos with this type of work and do not wish to penalize these folks. It's not quite the same as someone adding credits or a studio bumper before the video.

In your case it sounds like you just have some text in the corner of the video like something that used to be played on MTV (when they actually played music videos =p). You should remove this. If for some reason you cannot because you no longer have your master copy of the video then submit what you have and note this in the comment field. Be aware like technical faults it is viewed as an objective point that is used in scoring so your video will take a hit for it.

Summary:
Is it necessary to the video? Is it easily removed?

As we need to add consistent title cards to help the audience and judges with identification purposes the extra credits generally add confusion and the viewers tend to ignore part of your video. This tends to be why so few use the MTV style credits these days. While it may not seem so at first this rule is actually to your benefit. Plus it allows me to do some blind focus testing before con to some people who may be familiar with creator's names.

[BasharOfTheAges]

As I state (or I think I did) in the email with the FTP info, you must close your account for us to do anything with the video within. Until you close the account your video's status will not move from "Entry Form Accepted" to "Video Received". I do not move your entry from the upload folder until the account has been closed, which means ultimately the file will not be seen by Outlawed for Quality Check, thus you wont know if the video is accepted. Also, that means that if there is a problem you wont know before the deadline if you need to fix an error and re-submit.

In other words, as soon as you're done uploading, close your account. It's easier on us (since we don't have to do as much work at the end) and easier on your nerves (since you'll know if your video is fine sooner.) Well, unless you don't care if your entry get's DQ'ed and you have no time to fix it.

Is the point of all this to check entries as they come in? Are you on some sort of weekly or bi-weekly rotation for that?

[NS]

Mine is still Marked as Disqualified... Will it always say that? is there some way from me to be assured that you got the updated copy.

[ngsilver]

Is the point of all this to check entries as they come in? Are you on some sort of weekly or bi-weekly rotation for that?

This is so that I know that the video is uploaded and complete so I can then notify Outlawed that he can grab the video and run his QC on it. No video can be checked until that point, and he does QC on whatever schedule he does it on.

[outlawed]

Updates have been made again. When your video has been vetted and passed my QC they get flagged video checked. I don't process nightly even if we get nightly uploads (except for when everyone is flooding us near the due date). Keep in mind the checking time frame may seem weird to some folks. The reason not that many get checked on weekends this early is that I work Sat-Wed and I tend to like to batch process them closer to my days off. In addition I've been working on some documentation for Julius and Nate to look at. Workload is distributed. Nate runs the server and I'm so thankful he's put together such a nice system. It allows me to spend much more time focusing on making sure everything is solid. Then Nate isn't bogged down dealing with contacting anyone trying to resolve some weird glitch we run across which I had to do for a couple videos last year.

Is the point of all this to check entries as they come in? Are you on some sort of weekly or bi-weekly rotation for that?

Main reason for having you notify us the upload is complete is it's too hard for us to know if a file is missing something. It's a method of control for our benefit to know the exact status of the upload as Nate pointed out. On a side note I literally do perform QC with videos. I watch them through in their entirety at least twice and perform some basic tests on them. This is all before I even participate in judging =p. My estimate is I saw each vid in its entirety about 10 times on average last year.

Mine is still Marked as Disqualified... Will it always say that? is there some way from me to be assured that you got the updated copy.

It's good. The system will now show video checked with the DQ status set to no. The previous comments I also removed.

[BasharOfTheAges]

It's a pretty neat system you have going. I applaud it.