The KoP prescreening was definitely interesting... I think Brian's "
Evangelion Muppet Show Bumper" quickly became the 'mascot AMV' of the prescreening. There were definitely some doozeys, as well as some excellent vids I'd not seen before.
Encoding and capture were definitely two of the most common problems with the videos. On at least one or two we saw a few frames of the editor's desktop because they hadn't put blank space on the videos to give them time to stop the VCR before the video ended and their media player went from full-screen to windowed. We frame-advanced back to look at the desktop on at least one of these.. "Aw man, DivX player..." "Look! AOL! That explains a bit..."
A few other things.... Subtitles. We all love them (well, most of us). But, as has been discussed many times, they just don't belong in AMVs. I'm not talking about subtitled translations of the song being sung (which several videos incorporated), that's part of the video and just fine. But subtitles to the series, when the lines aren't part of what's central to the video (must make this disclaimer because I have seen some videos that have used the original dialog and subbed it because it was important to the plot of the video), they're just distracting. Plus- more importantly here- the Otakon rules expressly say "Thou Shalt Not Have Commercial/Fansub Subtitles" (well, OK, I'm making that more grandiose...). It doesn't take
that much work to lose the subtitles. Easiest solution- use clean source. Preferrably commercially released, as it supports those who make the anime and allows them to make more. If this just isn't possible and you have to use something subtitled (be it commercially subbed tapes or fansubs of something unreleased), either a) make an effort to edit around the subtitles, b) edit them out (time consuming and may not work well on some lower quality footage), or c) zoom or letterbox to get rid of them. I personally would prefer to see someone even use letterboxes that pop up and down (like we had to do on my early videos- see
Love is on the Way if you don't know what I mean) to footage that still had subs in it.
Lastly- from the Otakon contest rules-
05. No Objectionable Content
Content of videos must be suitable for viewing by our under-21 members (or worse, their parents). We may have problems with songs that are too explicit for radio airplay, or footage that is too extreme for general broadcast.
If two versions of a song exist- an uncensored version and a radio edit, which do you think you should use? Sure- in many cases the uncensored version is funnier or more amusing... but with this rule, it's likely to get you DQ'd. This does vary from con-to-con.... for example, AWA doesn't have any problems with it from what the rules say, though the video may be limited to being shown later at night. But, when there is expressly a rule against it- use the radio edit. Or simply put in your own *BLEEEEP*s over the likely objectionable content. If it's a comedy video, odds are they'll get laughs on their own. In some cases, the radio edits are simpy the normal version with the objectionable contest silenced out, and you can just interchange the audio and have both uncensored and sanitized copies of the video available.
The three tapes we watched definitely had a variety of content, both in quality and in the content of the videos.
Ironically, even with as hard to watch as some of the videos were (Get it away! Bad! Boo! BOOOO! *see video linked at top of post*), the prescreenings were far less annoying than the 150 mile drive home afterwards that ended up taking nearly 6 hours....
is not one of the words I believe that would get the song tossed from radio/TV play by FCC broadcast standards, which was what I was kind of using loosely as a guide for what was appropriate. If anything in your vid would DQ it under objectionable content, I'd think it would be the scene with Mini-Me and the topless woman. Even with the blurs, I would have been worried (were I making it) about it being counted as 'objectionable content'. 
