A-Kon Video Contests and Events 2007

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 6:06 pm

If you want to do something like that, just stick to a simple small scale. When you preview the videos have a screen there and a projector so you can gauge the difference. But don't make it too much work for yourselves. Use a simple 1-10 scale for quality degradation and alert those over a certain threshold.

As you sorta hinted to, the people that know video quality counts are the ones that usually have it right. The others - in most cases are just happy to have a video shown if it's good enough to get in, and there's little actual measuring you need to do to say "hey , your fan subbed footage sucked at such big sizes."

princess myu · Post by **princess myu** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 6:43 pm

do you have to be there to enter a video?

Elgebar · Post by **Elgebar** » Fri Jan 12, 2007 10:48 pm

sailor earth wrote:do you have to be there to enter a video?

Not at all. We have quite a few creators who make submissions but do not make the contest. If you are absent and win an award you have two options:

Option 1: Enter your address when you register to submit on our website and we will mail you any awards you win.

Option 2: Enter a Proxy Recipient in your creator profile when you register to submit on our website and we will give that individual the award to bring home to you.

Elgebar · Post by **Elgebar** » Fri Jan 12, 2007 10:51 pm

BasharOfTheAges wrote:As you sorta hinted to, the people that know video quality counts are the ones that usually have it right. The others - in most cases are just happy to have a video shown if it's good enough to get in, and there's little actual measuring you need to do to say "hey , your fan subbed footage sucked at such big sizes."

Thanks for the feedback. I am all for the KISS method when it comes to potentially creating more work. I think a simple 1-10 scale would work fine if we decide to incorporate this feature.

Elgebar · Post by **Elgebar** » Fri Jan 12, 2007 10:56 pm

For those monitoring this thread, I have just brought up our new FTP engine and setup. I know its still quite a bit early to expect anyone to upload their submissions, but the FTP server is now up for anyone who is incredibly eager or prepared.

We changed it up a bit this year. We now support SQL based authentication via FTP so now every user gets an FTP account created dynamically when they enter a submission with the FTP method flag. The authentication for the website will also match and update with your website information.

The major benefit to this is we are now able to offer each user their own directory for uploading their submissions and likewise the ability to delete and modify their files in the event that they experience issues during upload.

A couple of other neat features are auto-renaming and auto-resume. Our new FTP setup will automatically try to resume any file you have partially uploaded provided you are trying to upload a file with the exact same name. For the auto-resume feature to work correctly, you should use an FTP client that supports resuming uploads. Likewise, if you attempt to upload a file with the same name as one that is already present, if a resume is not possible, the server will automatically rename your file as <filename>.2 etc...

I hope this makes a few things a bit easier for everyone this year.

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 8:54 pm

After you make an account and try to submit it tells you that submissions are closed for this year. If you're not getting any submissions this may have something to do with it.

rubyeye · Post by **rubyeye** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 12:46 am

BasharOfTheAges wrote:After you make an account and try to submit it tells you that submissions are closed for this year. If you're not getting any submissions this may have something to do with it.

That's odd. Deadline is not until April 15. Has anyone else had any problems with submitting their video?

I havn't signed up yet so I can't confirm your problem. Please contact Chris through the Contact Us link on the Video Events homepage. I will email him as well to update me on the status of submissions.

Thanks for letting me know.

Elgebar · Post by **Elgebar** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 5:34 pm

Ok gang should be fixed now. Between server updates for the DST change and some poorly hacked in code I wrote, the site inadvertently shut down the submissions. I have removed the problem code and everything should be working fine now.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to post or shoot me an email about this.

Banass · Post by **Banass** » Sun Mar 25, 2007 4:53 pm

Meh, I guess I'll enter this contest.

JudgeHolden · Post by **JudgeHolden** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 11:03 am

Elgebar wrote:
YAY i can join experts contest this year XD
Yes, and you better. We really enjoyed your work last year and want to see more from you.

You sure go all out on your website for this.
Lol! It's all for you guys. We're actually changing a number of things with our processing a playback as well. As I promised last year, I managed to scrape up a budget for moving the contest to direct computer playback which means...NO MORE ENCODING AND PLAYBACK ISSUES!

While this is very cool for the creators, it's equally as cool for my staff and I. It also allows us to make immediate assesments of the playback quality. One of the features I would like to incorporate next year is a playback quality indicator on the status page though I haven't come up with a good way to represent this yet. Any thoughts?

So we can send Mp4s?