Round 1 (COMPLETE!)

[Radical_Yue]

Only 1 drop from Group D and holycrapround2isalmosthere! O: O: O:

Yup, Group A starts their 2nd round on May 15th!

[LopezAMV]

Yup, Group A starts their 2nd round on May 15th!

Time to knock some socks off

[Nya-chan Production]

Just a pointer for the contestants - if your video is over 40 - 50MB for 2 minutes video, something is wrong, most probably on your side. I am slowly getting tired of downloading those HUGE packs of data...

[HaydenST]

Just a pointer for the contestants - if your video is over 40 - 50MB for 2 minutes video, something is wrong, most probably on your side. I am slowly getting tired of downloading those HUGE packs of data...

If it's for HQ okay, but for HD videos, this is shitty visual quality for 50MB even for 2 minutes
For me, I prefer watch a video a little more heavy with an awesome visual quality

[pacotacoshell]

Just a pointer for the contestants - if your video is over 40 - 50MB for 2 minutes video, something is wrong, most probably on your side. I am slowly getting tired of downloading those HUGE packs of data...

If it's for HQ okay, but for HD videos, this is shitty visual quality for 50MB even for 2 minutes
For me, I prefer watch a video a little more heavy with an awesome visual quality

I had a 4 minute 1080p video at 70mb. Zarx264GUI is very handy and very easy to use. Everyone on these boards should be using it.

[HaydenST]

Just a pointer for the contestants - if your video is over 40 - 50MB for 2 minutes video, something is wrong, most probably on your side. I am slowly getting tired of downloading those HUGE packs of data...

If it's for HQ okay, but for HD videos, this is shitty visual quality for 50MB even for 2 minutes
For me, I prefer watch a video a little more heavy with an awesome visual quality

I had a 4 minute 1080p video at 70mb. Zarx264GUI is very handy and very easy to use. Everyone on these boards should be using it.

I use ZarxGui, you know
no it's just think people did a good encode with very good quality for the judges' eyes XD, so it's a little heavy, 100mb for 720p it's acceptable with a better quality.
It's just my point of view

[Kairih]

I agree with Hayden.

[Kinematics]

100 MB for ~2 minutes of video is ~6500 kbps, so something like CRF 15-16 using x264 on 720p or 1080p video. There is very little reason to push it that far; 16-17 should be more than enough (going below 16 is almost never justified), though 18 is usually fine (especially if Hi10p, but I generally don't expect that).

Of the three 100+MB files I've seen so far (all 720p), one is a constant bitrate WMV (8000 kbps) that absolutely did not need that bitrate (looks like it would have been fine at 2000) @29.97 fps; one is an unidentified divx/xvid at 5687 kbps that I can see justifying the bitrate to compensate for the weaker codec, given the complexity of the video (also @29.97 fps); and one that appears to be Apple's encoder (a mediocre h.264 encoder) that didn't use CABAC and only had 2 reframes (at least it wasn't 1, which would be horrible, but bare minimum should really be 3), so ended up with a bloated encode despite a 23.976 fps.

I'd agree than a well done x264 encode really shouldn't be more than ~30 MB per minute at 720p (so ~60-75 MB at most for the lengths of the videos in the contest, plus whatever audio). There's a lot more than just file size to indicate a well-done encode, but if you're going significantly over the 50 MB mark noted in the earlier post for a 2 minute video, you probably really do need to take a serious look at what you're doing on the encoding side.

[AMV_4000]

This is why I stick to 320x240 rm files... great quality for a great size... about 1 mb per minute

[mirkosp]

Kinematics knows what he's saying... but that said, I'm not considering filesize too much for these encodes, mostly because I don't expect the average AMVer to know farther than zarxgui's defaults and such, so I personally am going to consider filesize as a negative point only once we hit really ridiculous amounts... but that's because I'm trying to be nice.
In the end, there are things more important than filesize and quality to consider in an amv, so I won't start detracting for those unless it's painfully obvious that the quality is subpar/the filesize really is too big. I wouldn't want quality to be the key factor to put one video higher than the other ─ but it is still something I consider and that can put a video at disadvantage. I just don't want to be too harsh when there are more important aspects to an amv to consider, that's all.

That said, we also have to consider another thing about filesize: AMV visuals tend to be a lot busier than what an anime normally has. Sped up coloured footage and constant action and a lot of visual changes for the whole duration aren't exactly uncommon, and that's going to suck extra bitrate easily. So even at crf 17-18 it's possible to get past 4000kbps at 720p24. Hell, without tweaking x264's settings, a crf20 is prolly gonna push the filesize past 10mbps if you put some heavy static/noise effects for a while.
And while it's possible to optimize the settings, I don't think this is knowledge we should expect the average amver to have, since the focus for an amver is the editing, not the encoding.