The ENTRY COMPILATION: Good Idea or BAD idea?

#1

I posted this compilation last night…

http://rapidshare.de/files/7123627/FXWARS.wmv.html

and I gotten more flack than a WWII bomber.

The idea I had for the compilation is that there are people who cant access all the entries becase of a slow dial up connection. Dont forget this is an international forum, and a bit chunk of the plantet still have dial up that is why the file is less than 8 megs,

Of course when the voting thread goes up, tonight, the voters dont have to use it, they can still download the individual entries as always…

So tell me people, do you like that idea? Or did the Diet Coke I drank last night affected me in a bad way?

Looking forward to your comments.

-R
PS But hey, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

#2

Well, as a Mac-mostly guy, I can tell you that the codec doesn’t work within the Mac version of Win Media player. Black video and silent.

Don’t think it’s that bad of an idea, though. Maybe if it utilizes something like Flash video or Quicktime to make it easier for everyone to access.

Edit: Now that I’ve got to a PC to view it on the squished aspect ratio of a lot of the entries makes me cringe a little, not to mentioned my mispelled name :wink:

–T

#3

just watched it on windows media player on a G4 Mac running tiger and the clip plays fine, a good idea for people who have been able to download all the seperate clips of the final pieces.

#4

Confirmed. I downloaded and reinstalled the latest version of WMP from the disturbingly named Microsoft MacTopia and it’s working now.

Guess I just didn’t have access to the v9 codecs and the player wasn’t failing elegantly. My bad.

After mulling it over for a bit during breakfast, I understand why the aspect ratios got crunched for the compilation – it’s unfair to judge image quality on the 2.35:1 and 1.85:1 entries when they’re about 100 pixels high next to a full frame entry.

I’m stumped for an elegant solution to this at tinyrez™, to be honest. I guess the future rules could dictate a specific aspect ratio for entries, but that’s a nasty can of worms to open, I’d suspect. Personally, I despise 4:3 TV ratio for compositional purposes.

#5

In the Big Freeze challenge, you had put out a specific request for “teasers”, which came with specs on resolution and time and such. I think this worked well.

Perhaps for future FXWars, the “teaser clip” could be part of the entry requirement. (For submission a day or two after the initial deadline?)
This way, everyone is free to be creative with aspect ratios and sizes for their “hero” entry, but they are also in control of making their own “best presentation” for the short/low-res teaser.

To get really slick, the teaser video would be presented in something like Flash or Quicktime that would allow for URL links to be embedded within the the teaser, so viewers could download “full” versions of entries (or at least jump to each entry’s thread) directly through the teaser. :slight_smile:

Have fun.

#6

The idea of a compilation clip is great! :thumbsup:

Particularly as a voter, the idea in combination with the voting page ROCKS. Time after time I’ve simply given up voting in the FXWars entirely, because after downloading all entries, all I had were files with random and non-uniform names. Looking thought entries and voting should be as easy as possible (cause we all want people to vote, don’t we? - not much competition if the only voters are the 7 competitors and their friends :wink: ).

But I was just a tad shocked when I saw my clip (my baby!) streched and compressed to Venus. My first thought was “god, I hope no one is watching this, please please please only watch the individual clips”.

And no critique or flack meant in that statement, Roberto. :wink: The idea is wonderful, no doubt.

Dunno. 8 minutes compressed to a reasonable file size… 8 minutes is a lot! Is it possible?

Cheers,

  • Jonas
#7

Of course someone might bring up that a length limitation be applied to the contest. Ie, if there’s a maximum of 15 seconds, a montage of 8 entries could be limited to two minutes, which, when compressed to 8mb would be significantly more beautiful than 8 minutes in 8 mb.

Downside: I like the openness of the contest, that you can create a long clip if you want to. This is a friendly, fun contest, let’s not bury it in limitations.

Alternative: entries may be as long as people want, but they should provide a 10-second movie for the montage. Then they can edit their preffered highlights in this clip (so Roberto isn’t sued for choosing the “wrong part” of someone’s clip :wink: )

Downside: as deadline approached, I was more than enough stressed with having to comp, render, compress and upload a single clip, plus a poster picture. Having to edit a second piece, compress it, and upload it would’t exactly have relieved me of stress. :slight_smile:

But, the “10 second highlight” could be optional, and if it’s not provided, Roberto can just take the first 10 seconds.

How’s that?

Cheers,

  • Jonas
#8

I think that the compilation, as a teaser reel works very well (ala Big Freeze), the back-to-back combination of all of the full entries doesn’t work so well with me though.

I like the idea of being able to download all of the entries in one shot though. Perhaps, the good-ole BT seeds that CGS was working on is in order.

Each team submits a teaser “to spec” 5 days prior to deadline via FTP Teaser comp is produced and BT/HTTP released… maybe even a iPod Subsription setup?..
Finals are submitted via same method and a .zip file is released via BT… with the same old self-hosted, alt-means HTTP hosting.

To spec = Size, Codec, Format…

The biggest technical problem I have with the current compilation is not the stretching… but the re-compressing… encoding a collection of already encoded video makes for nasty artifacts. These are not terribly noticeable at 320x240, but anything larger and it would look pretty ugly.

#9

5 days?? What are we supposed to upload then, wireframes? I had nothing even semi-final to show, even 5 hours before deadline.

:slight_smile: Cheers,

  • Jonas
#10

No Problems on my Mac!! But I do highly suggest Quicktime… most artists here seem to use it too…

#11

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