Acen Report... kinda

[mckeed]

What were the results of the contest?

[Flint the Dwarf]

Did my video get into the contest? o.o I'm guessing not, but I had to ask.

You got in

Ah, cool. One of twenty one isn't too bad... right? >.>

[godix]

All entries and the winners for Acen are listed <a href="http://www.acen.org/forums/showthread.p ... 0">here</a>.

For those to lazy to click the links:
Best Drama: A Different Side of Me by Suberunker Studeosh

Best Theme: Blatant Travel Commerical by rogueintelligenceproductions

Best Staff: 'Cuz I'm a GAL (Kogals Are Easy) by Brackus JS Productions

Best Action: Chuunin Combat by Songbird 21

Best Comedy: Why...? Can't...? I...? by AtomX

Best Technical Achievement: Ghibli's All Around the World by gODIX

Best Original Concept: A Hellingly Thrillish Night by Dragon Eye Studios

Best of Show: Alternate Eva Openting: Eva Bebop by Scintilla, Peter J. Tom-Wolverton

[Quu]

I burned a bunch of CDs with my AMVs on them, passed them out to random people, tried to get them to play my vids in the AMV room. Appearently the AMV room's (substandard?) equipment can only play MPEG2 and MPEG1 videos, and all my stuff was MPEG4. Why they can't use a standard TV out is beyond me. That's all we use at Archon, and it rocks gonads. Any format. ANY FORMAT. anyway.... I was pissed about that one.

I use a netstream 2000 to output the videos...
I have custom drivers sent to me from sigma designs... the entire setup stable... i find you use of "substandard" amusing...

VGA out from a computer will automaically de interlace the video signal for the VGA portion, then will re interlace it for the S-Video out...

also... i don't want to playback any format... i want stability... i have gotten xvid encodes that have crashed players or codecs... i have gotten AVI files that required a reboot after playing them... I know that when i play a video in the netstream... it will play it the same everytime i play it...

i don't use the netstream 4000 becasue its drivers are not mature, and i have found 7+ playback flaws in it... When the netstram 4000 is stable anbd mature i will move to it...

and yes... the quality differance is noticable, moreso when you use an interlaced video....

[Garylisk]

and yes... the quality differance is noticable, moreso when you use an interlaced video....

Well then, there you go.

[Illia Sadri]

As far as the elevator imbeciles went.... yes it is old and annoying. Basically I had to on a couple occasions basically kick people out. It is very true that if you are on level 9/10 or on level 1 the elevator should automatically be full.

And I do recall one instance where Quu also took the time to boot them out. You know after several attempts at getting an elevator in the 1st floor lobby were filled.

Of course it works better when you have one of those nice verticle staff badges. Flash it and people will suddenly start moving.



As far as the contest..... good but long. Too long. After the three and a half hours and not sleeping for nearly three days prior my butt was sore and I was bordering being incoherent.

As far as the rules went, goodness, so many amazing videos that had bumpers. Watching the first theme entry and then seeing that thing I groaned. It was so easily the best one.

Quu already said everything that needed to be said on the amv room's playback. And it did pay off in the fact that a 24 hour room went pretty damn close to flawless. Save one projector bulb starting to die at one point everything worked quite well.

[Garylisk]

Yeah, seeing how big the room just for AMVs was kind of surprised me. I'm used to Archon, which is a much smaller con. The AMV room of Acen could seat 4x the number of people tha tcan fit in the anime room at Archon. And it had 2 screens - I was very impressed by that. Very smart idea. At Archon, we only ever have 2 screens for Rocky Horror, and that's because the Sci-Fi and Anime rooms are actually the same room, divided by a slide-out wall. For Roky Horror, we push the wall away since there's a big crowd for it every year.

However, last year and the year before, the anime room at Archon has been getting pretty packed, especially for the showings of FLCL, DDR Project, and Akira. (or any othe rpopular anime title. Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust would have been packed last year if it had been on Saturday and not on Friday during the day. I also recall Love Hina Again being packed beyond capacity 2 years ago.)

Anyway, overall, I was very impressed by the video rooms at Acen.. they definitely changed my outlook on things... I'm definitely going to have to use some of the things I learned from this experience to help the Archon anime content out. We still plan to have an AMV Contest, info coming soon. Also, possibly 2 anime rooms, an AMV workshop panel, and maybe.. just maybe.. a dedicated AMV room. If not a room, then just an area somewhere int he hotel that has a computer playing AMVs for the whole con. I dunno. I know most of you don't go to Archon.. in fact, I've never met anyone at Archon who goes to this site... but hey, if you wanna go to a con in late september/early october, an d AWA is too far away, or maybe AWA wasn't enough of a party... check out Archon (Okay, I'm done pimping Archon... )

So yeah.. Acen video programming.. big thumbs up.. just a little aggrivated at the restrictions on format.. but I'll get over it. And Quu, I meant no insult when I said that, trust me. You have your reasons for doing it the way you do it, I just was a little confused.

[trythil]

And I do recall one instance where Quu also took the time to boot them out. You know after several attempts at getting an elevator in the 1st floor lobby were filled.

Oh yes, THAT incident

Quu scared the hell out of me when he did that. I was pretty impressed, though

[Quu]

And Quu, I meant no insult when I said that, trust me. You have your reasons for doing it the way you do it, I just was a little confused.

the restriction is for AT CON... not for submissions...
in fact... i tend to have a policy of not accepting videos at a con when i can't check the video, except for panelists...

i have had one joker splice a bit of porn on the tail end of a video they handed to me on cd at one animazement.... did not think i would catch it in time.