A newbie needs some help

[OtakUnite]

Greetings!
For ages and ages I have watched other people's AMVs and have been stunned with how awesome they were, but I never reali thought about making my own... so I think now is a good time to start.

I have an incredible AMV idea but don't know how to make it happen.

I'm entering my AMV in a contest and here are the rules that I don't understand the meaning of :
- Video must be NTSC (not PAL or SECAM).
- MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 are the required format for your video to be submitted in. Be aware that if you submit a video in a non-MPEG format, we will disqualify your video. Video is preferred to be 720x480 pixels in size and at a frame rate of 29.97 fps (NTSC).
- Audio should be encoded at 48000 KHz. DO NOT ENCODE YOUR AUDIO AT 44100 KHz.
- DO NOT put any silent black before or after the video.

Can these rules be followed while making an AMV using iMovie or similar programs for Macs? (I read most of Kirin's Guide to Making AMVs with iMovie but didn't realy understand it... I also downloaded all of the freeware exept for Explicit... which wouldn't work)

Thanks for bothering to read and thank you very much if you reply!

[Kariudo]

I don't think you should have any problems.
I'd reccomend getting premiere 6 for mac if you have some money to spend.

anyway...
I've never heard of SECAM...
NTSC, it is a standard for video mainly used in North America
it differs from PAL in the framerate and refresh order.
NTSC starts refreshing pixils from the top of the screen, while PAL starts from the bottom.

MPEG1 and 2 are file formats (that helps a lot I bet). Files using these formats are encoded as MPEG1 and MPEG2 files respectively, encoding makes the filesize more manageable and also makes it easier for things to process.
Higher filesize means higher quality in this case (to a point)
I believe that the cons request amvs in this format so that they can easily put all the amvs on a dvd which will be put into a player and projected onto a big screen (MPEG2 is closely related to the format that dvds use to store information on)

I'm sure you know about the resolution (720x480)
Audio is just a bunch of vibrations, so 48 MHz means that the sound is emitted at 48000 vibrations every second.
I belive that this is the rate that audio is stored on cds.
The contest probably requests this to make all audio more uniform, and there may be something about the sounds system that requires audio to be at that rate.

The last part means don't have any empty black sections before or after
so at intro and end, you can't have black screen and no sound...you can do this at other places in the amv, but this probably isn't the best editing method (putting black space in the middle of your video)

[Scintilla]

Actually, standard audio CDs have a sample rate of 44100 Hz (NOT kHz! somebody screwed that up), which is probably why the coordinator felt s/he had to point out that such a rate is not acceptable. 48000 Hz is the sample rate for audio on most (all?) DVDs.

Which means that this contest is probably going to be run off a DVD, and the coordinator doesn't want to handle converting the audio him/herself.

I suppose I should state at this point that SSRC is supposed to be the best algorithm there currently is for converting 44100 Hz audio to 48000 Hz (last I checked). BeSweet and AVISynth can both use it.

I must say, though, that this is the first time I've seen convention contest rules that forbade audio at 44100 Hz...

[Keeper of Hellfire]

To add: SECAM is the French color TV norm, used in France, former French colonies and was used by the COMECON countries. For digital media there is no difference to PAL.