How do you judge contest credibility?

[BasharOfTheAges]

Rules on content should pertain to each submission in isolation. An applicant should not be responsible for anyone's content but their own. "This is a <rating> contest" is not a clearly defined thing you should be saying on a rules sheet... it's a wishy-washy statement that's a non-sequitir to the rule set. Direct listings of what you expect out of a single individual video should really be all that you convey with your rules. It's like a contract - or at least most people tend to treat it that way with having to sign it and all - contracts work both ways. Both parties stick to their word.

It's one of those "the convention execs might give me shit about it, but it's in the rules now, so I'll obey and re-write them next year" sorta things.

[Amo-Chan]

Amo-Chan: the PG-13 also does allow for a higher degree of violence etc to be displayed

Oh, I know that. I was just using my own personal example. I don't usually do violence in my vids, but I'm a HUGE fan of swearing XD.

[CorpseGoddess]

Amo-Chan: the PG-13 also does allow for a higher degree of violence etc to be displayed

Oh, I know that. I was just using my own personal example. I don't usually do violence in my vids, but I'm a HUGE fan of swearing XD.

It's been my experience that the "PG-13" usually pertains to language and/or sexually explicit situations, at least in North America. Blood and guts is okay for the kiddies, but for THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T LET THEM SEE ANY TITTIES!

[Rider4Z]

i'll enter anything if:

1.) i'm not required to attend. i would love to attend any and all conventions in north america but i work and need money to pay for my mortgage and car. i enter contests not to win but to give my videos exposure. whether i make the finals / win is up to the judges and/or audience.

2.) mp4 and online submissions are allowed. i save creditless versions of all my videos, compressed and ready for upload. not allowing credits is understandable, but requiring specific amounts of black before and/or after the video is pushing it. those i probably won't submit to if they require i go back to my original source and have to change something.


other than that, whatever the coordinators require is their business. if they have no trolling policies due to the age of a video or wins, then i do my best to oblige. in my opinion, putting on contests is a lot of work and they're the ones doing us the favor. so i try not to contribute to the complaining.

[HalOfBorg]

i'll enter anything if:
1.) i'm not required to attend. i would love to attend any and all conventions in north america but i work and need money to pay for my mortgage and car. i enter contests not to win but to give my videos exposure. whether i make the finals / win is up to the judges and/or audience.
2.) mp4 and online submissions are allowed. i save creditless versions of all my videos, compressed and ready for upload. not allowing credits is understandable, but requiring specific amounts of black before and/or after the video is pushing it. those i probably won't submit to if they require i go back to my original source and have to change something.
other than that, whatever the coordinators require is their business. if they have no trolling policies due to the age of a video or wins, then i do my best to oblige. in my opinion, putting on contests is a lot of work and they're the ones doing us the favor. so i try not to contribute to the complaining.

Wow - I could have written this - but not as well. (in fact, I think I did)

[Rider4Z]

Wow - I could have written this - but not as well. (in fact, I think I did)

i got your back

[Pwolf]

but requiring specific amounts of black before and/or after the video is pushing it.

That's actually not entirely unreasonable if you know the technical reasons why someone would want you to do that. Not to mention it's not that difficult to take your master copy and add 2 seconds of black to the beginning and end. i actually try to do this every time I edit so I don't have to do it afterwards. If you have to re-encode the video for the con, its only a minute or two amount of extra work (if that) so it's really not that bad.

[Seijin_Dinger]

I actually dont consider it too much extra work to add the black myself as then I can better have an even spacing between videos. Just have never gotten to the right sweet spot of black space between videos, right now its slate=>1 second black=>video=>1 second black=>slate...etc and then3 seconds black between the last video of a category and the next category bumper

[l33tmeatwad]

in my opinion, putting on contests is a lot of work and they're the ones doing us the favor. so i try not to contribute to the complaining.

Not directing this at you, but I will say that a lot of people clump criticism and complaining together. There is a fine line between the two, but with some criticism things often don't evolve and improve. The key to that is to try and not come across negatively (if possible).

[BasharOfTheAges]

This thread isn't really supposed to be about actively complaining about what contests do, but rather, the things they do that make you just walk away and not take them seriously enough to participate in the first place.

The lead-in / lead-out stuff might be an odd technical requirement from your pov (since you can uniformly apply that sort of thing in software while making the contest DVD or playlist) but there's nothing inherently deserving of disdain about having odd technical requirements. I suppose you could say it makes the person requiring it seem lazy since it takes longer to re-encode your video than to insert a pregened black video segment to a timeline between title cards, but that's a stretch.