Round 2 - Results [Updated with Group G & H Results]

[MimS]

To be honest i didn't like a lot of the videos,

In Dn@'s case, this sentence is actually true for any contest

[GuntherAMVs]

*.. GuntherAMVs rises, army helmet tipped slightly to the right, heavy boots muddled with grime as she struggles, slowly, from the walls of text she has just waded through.. the sheer amount of words has overwhelmed her senses, but she manages to claw her way up the side of a forum interface.. she has little knowledge of the battle that has just taken place, only knows that it was intense.. overlooking the ground below, strewn with comments from and bodies of a myriad of editors, she can only feebly reach for their forms..*

"Editors!" she cries, balling a hand into a fist and stabbing at the sky. "You have all fought valiantly! May those that move forward remember their brothers and sisters they left behind-.." She breaks off into a series of coughs, clutching to her only weapon: Vegas Pro 11. Alas, her injuries from Round 2 were too great. She feels weak.

As she slumps to the ground, she can only just see the outlines of her worthy and illustrious opponents: Scoob, Copycat, and Hayden. She calls to them, trying to make herself heard over the wind that rolls through the wilderness.

"Men! If I don't make it," she says, a bit of fresh blood trickling out of the side of her mouth. "Avenge me!"

*dramatic credits music... to be continued..*

ps. I have no idea what happened here x'DD.. I saw, like, really long boxes of text, and wanted to write my own, but had no idea what to say :'DDDDDDDDDDDD. Mods can of course remove this post, if they need to ^_^

[Radical_Yue]

To be honest i didn't like a lot of the videos,

In Dn@'s case, this sentence is actually true for any contest

It's one of the primary reasons I chose him as a judge. He doesn't pull punches and he doesn't favor or single anyone out. If he thinks everything is shit, he'll say it and never back-peddle if someone disagrees with him.


Each judge has their own strength that I like about them. Whether it's technical, mood, concept/theme/story, etc... They're all incredibly unbiased and have done a phenomenal job.

I still won't make the comments public, perhaps after the contest is said and done, but you can still PM me and I'll share. But they've looked past sources that are disliked/overused, poor quality, bad editing, etc, things that would normally make the average editor automatically exit out of a video, and judged fairly.

Yes, I can see why a lot of people disagree with the results, not for just this round but also past rounds. I won't lie, a lot of the videos I started, saw a glaringly obvious problem and clicked out of. But I'm just coordinating so whether or not I like the video doesn't matter. However, these are awesome people that saw that problem that made me exit out faster than lightning, took it into account, and continued on to find not only flaws in the video but also it's strengths.

I've heard people say "better use effects if I want to make it to the next round" or "need to make it 1080p or I don't have a chance" but time and time again I've seen better ratings given to videos that are neither of those, simply because they're just really good videos. All because the editor took more time working on flow and concept rather than concentrating on camera zooms and crazy filters. I've also seen effect videos win out over basic editing due to incredibly loose story, bad scene selection and bad flow.

Who is to say a 720p effects video is better than a basic video with a concept/flow? Who is to a say a basic video with only concept/flow is better than a 720p video with effects? It goes both ways.

Either way, no matter which way you choose to go, your video will be judged accordingly.
You have to look at the big picture.
Just to make it very clear, this is not directed at anyone specifically. Just a general statement I'm making in my sleep deprived state of "@_@"-ness.




And DAMN. The rules do sound sexier in French.

[CodeZTM]

*.. GuntherAMVs rises, army helmet tipped slightly to the right, heavy boots muddled with grime as she struggles, slowly, from the walls of text she has just waded through.. the sheer amount of words has overwhelmed her senses, but she manages to claw her way up the side of a forum interface.. she has little knowledge of the battle that has just taken place, only knows that it was intense.. overlooking the ground below, strewn with comments from and bodies of a myriad of editors, she can only feebly reach for their forms..*

"Editors!" she cries, balling a hand into a fist and stabbing at the sky. "You have all fought valiantly! May those that move forward remember their brothers and sisters they left behind-.." She breaks off into a series of coughs, clutching to her only weapon: Vegas Pro 11. Alas, her injuries from Round 2 were too great. She feels weak.

As she slumps to the ground, she can only just see the outlines of her worthy and illustrious opponents: Scoob, Copycat, and Hayden. She calls to them, trying to make herself heard over the wind that rolls through the wilderness.

"Men! If I don't make it," she says, a bit of fresh blood trickling out of the side of her mouth. "Avenge me!"

*dramatic credits music... to be continued..*

ps. I have no idea what happened here x'DD.. I saw, like, really long boxes of text, and wanted to write my own, but had no idea what to say :'DDDDDDDDDDDD. Mods can of course remove this post, if they need to ^_^

You post the best stuff.

EDIT:

Oh, and some coherent addition to the discussion. Looking at this contest from the perspective of a coordinator, I think it's actually a very lovely system Yue has going with the images. Listing both positives and negatives of videos really show us what the consensus on the videos were. From what I can see, it was minor threads that were between elimination/safety in this round and most rounds. Don't assume that a "loss" or a "win" means anything other than how the videos were ranked. There are videos eliminated in this contest (and my contest) that I love and likely want to keep. Plus, as rounds go on and on it's not going to be so much as "which video was the worst" instead of "Which of these fantastic videos did something more wrong than the others?". We are, after all, dealing with a great group of editors here.

[Radical_Yue]

*.. GuntherAMVs rises, army helmet tipped slightly to the right, heavy boots muddled with grime as she struggles, slowly, from the walls of text she has just waded through.. the sheer amount of words has overwhelmed her senses, but she manages to claw her way up the side of a forum interface.. she has little knowledge of the battle that has just taken place, only knows that it was intense.. overlooking the ground below, strewn with comments from and bodies of a myriad of editors, she can only feebly reach for their forms..*

"Editors!" she cries, balling a hand into a fist and stabbing at the sky. "You have all fought valiantly! May those that move forward remember their brothers and sisters they left behind-.." She breaks off into a series of coughs, clutching to her only weapon: Vegas Pro 11. Alas, her injuries from Round 2 were too great. She feels weak.

As she slumps to the ground, she can only just see the outlines of her worthy and illustrious opponents: Scoob, Copycat, and Hayden. She calls to them, trying to make herself heard over the wind that rolls through the wilderness.

"Men! If I don't make it," she says, a bit of fresh blood trickling out of the side of her mouth. "Avenge me!"

*dramatic credits music... to be continued..*

ps. I have no idea what happened here x'DD.. I saw, like, really long boxes of text, and wanted to write my own, but had no idea what to say :'DDDDDDDDDDDD. Mods can of course remove this post, if they need to ^_^

You post the best stuff.

Doesn't she? xD

[Shin-AMV]

*.. GuntherAMVs rises, army helmet tipped slightly to the right, heavy boots muddled with grime as she struggles, slowly, from the walls of text she has just waded through.. the sheer amount of words has overwhelmed her senses, but she manages to claw her way up the side of a forum interface.. she has little knowledge of the battle that has just taken place, only knows that it was intense.. overlooking the ground below, strewn with comments from and bodies of a myriad of editors, she can only feebly reach for their forms..*

"Editors!" she cries, balling a hand into a fist and stabbing at the sky. "You have all fought valiantly! May those that move forward remember their brothers and sisters they left behind-.." She breaks off into a series of coughs, clutching to her only weapon: Vegas Pro 11. Alas, her injuries from Round 2 were too great. She feels weak.

As she slumps to the ground, she can only just see the outlines of her worthy and illustrious opponents: Scoob, Copycat, and Hayden. She calls to them, trying to make herself heard over the wind that rolls through the wilderness.

"Men! If I don't make it," she says, a bit of fresh blood trickling out of the side of her mouth. "Avenge me!"

*dramatic credits music... to be continued..*

ps. I have no idea what happened here x'DD.. I saw, like, really long boxes of text, and wanted to write my own, but had no idea what to say :'DDDDDDDDDDDD. Mods can of course remove this post, if they need to ^_^

[Kinematics]

And apropos of nothing in particular (and because there isn't really a thread where this belongs, but is vaguely related to earlier comments), I was wondering if a tournament like this (ie: multiple participants competing against each other at the same time each round, not one-on-one matches) might not do better with mahjong-style elimination brackets (as seen in Saki/Side A).

So something like:

Group A, round 1: 8 participants, 4 winners
Group B, round 1: 8 participants, 4 winners

Round 2: 4 winners from Group A + 4 winners from Group B = 8 participants, 4 winners

etc., and not drop down to small brackets til you reach the final rounds. That would minimize the funneling effect (ie: the balance between selection size and sample size) while early in the tournament.

Of course the idea was first based on the explanation of ratings from the rules. DN@'s reviews put it as a scale of 1-10 for everyone regardless, so the issue that the rules seemed to imply would occur may not actually exist, or impacts results differently than I expected.

A few other reasons:

Part of this also relates to the issue of people dropping out of the tournament. The more people in a given group/round, the less having one drop out 'hurts'.

Also a bit of selfishness; all these rounds with just 2-4 participants feel rather unsatisfying compared to the bounty in the first rounds.

And having more people in each round seems like it would do more to force creativity in choosing subject matter, to lower the risk of duplicating another person's idea. Of course that may carry the inverse risk of not getting a well-focused 'obvious' match if everyone's trying to be unique, or problematic sets where there's not as much room for creativity (techno/dubstep/etc songs). Can probably get around that by refining the bracket size (6 may be better than either 4 or 8).

The only real change would be a drop in the total number of songs used, from 29 to 18. Number of rounds and total number of videos would be the same. I could see where people might have a preference for a greater number of possible song choices, though.


Note: I generally don't notice or pay close attention to these contests (I've been largely away from AMVs for several years), so I have no idea what elimination formats have been tried or discarded before, or for what reasons. This is just an idea for something to consider in the future.

[Nya-chan Production]

And apropos of nothing in particular (and because there isn't really a thread where this belongs, but is vaguely related to earlier comments), I was wondering if a tournament like this (ie: multiple participants competing against each other at the same time each round, not one-on-one matches) might not do better with mahjong-style elimination brackets (as seen in Saki/Side A).

So something like:

Group A, round 1: 8 participants, 4 winners
Group B, round 1: 8 participants, 4 winners

Round 2: 4 winners from Group A + 4 winners from Group B = 8 participants, 4 winners

etc., and not drop down to small brackets til you reach the final rounds. That would minimize the funneling effect (ie: the balance between selection size and sample size) while early in the tournament.

Of course the idea was first based on the explanation of ratings from the rules. DN@'s reviews put it as a scale of 1-10 for everyone regardless, so the issue that the rules seemed to imply would occur may not actually exist, or impacts results differently than I expected.

A few other reasons:

Part of this also relates to the issue of people dropping out of the tournament. The more people in a given group/round, the less having one drop out 'hurts'.

Also a bit of selfishness; all these rounds with just 2-4 participants feel rather unsatisfying compared to the bounty in the first rounds.

And having more people in each round seems like it would do more to force creativity in choosing subject matter, to lower the risk of duplicating another person's idea. Of course that may carry the inverse risk of not getting a well-focused 'obvious' match if everyone's trying to be unique, or problematic sets where there's not as much room for creativity (techno/dubstep/etc songs). Can probably get around that by refining the bracket size (6 may be better than either 4 or 8).

The only real change would be a drop in the total number of songs used, from 29 to 18. Number of rounds and total number of videos would be the same. I could see where people might have a preference for a greater number of possible song choices, though.


Note: I generally don't notice or pay close attention to these contests (I've been largely away from AMVs for several years), so I have no idea what elimination formats have been tried or discarded before, or for what reasons. This is just an idea for something to consider in the future.

Honestly, as a judge, listening to the eight AMVs to some (in your ears) bad music is a murder/self-imposed-suicide. I am glad half of the first round is over ^^;

[MimS]

As an editor, when we're 8, it feels like "I just need to make an average vid, it'll be ok to go further", when we're 2 or 4 it 's like "I have to beat them all if I have to go further" and I prefer this option to the 1st one x)

[MimS]

Well, though, with group H, even though we 8, I do think I have to beat them all 'cause I think it's a hard one to deal with /o/