Judging DVC#3

[Michael Wisniewski]

Just finished judging all the films, and I gotta tell ya, this challenge was a real pleasure to judge. I enjoyed watching every entry, and I watched them at least 3 times each. I got a kick out of every entry.

There was a nice range too from scary, to suspenseful, to moody, sensitive, and silly (damn silly may I add).

Now some of the entries really pulled it together and of course got higher votes, but I can recommend watching every single one.

[Sean McHenry]

We are all anxious and, in Shakesperian terms, waiting with baited breath.

Will the first set of films locations be posted soon? I know Dylan is intending to release a few each day for us to watch. I have been watching mine for so long I'm almost tired of watching it.

Thanks again to the entire judging staff.

Sean McHenry

[Dylan Couper]

I'm still waiting for two judges to check back in, but I'll post the first five films.

[Dick Mays]

Originally Posted by Sean McHenry

We are all anxious and, in Shakesperian terms, waiting with baited breath.

Shakespeare... dude couldn't write without cliche's. Can't wait to take a look at these first five. Good thing the pink eye is keeping me home today.

[Ed Smith]

I'm with Michael.

This is the 3rd DVC I have judged on, It gets harder and harder each time. Every single one was produced to high standards, and they all entertained me (in some way).

Can't wait for the results...

Cheers,

Ed

[Keith Loh]

This is the first full scale one I've judged and the standards were very high.

My only quibble was that I needed to go through the pain of downloading Quicktime 7 for Windows to get those H264 encoded movies. I mean pain in that I downloaded iTunes three times and each time it gave me version 6.5 Quicktime. It's only when I did some searching that I found a standalone installer for Quicktime 7 only which gave me the correct one.

Please contestants in your next try please avoid new or obscure codecs. The H264 versions did look good but really the quality of the encode didn't effect my opinion that much.

[Meryem Ersoz]

well, for backstory, i ended up having to edit this darn thing in iMovie because i just purchased a new computer and, it turns out, that FCP has a capture problem in Tiger (diagnosed by Boyd in another thread), which i was not aware of at the time i shot the film, so FCP was not working with my camera that day. doing decent custom compressions out of iMovie is not easy (believe me, i tried several methods, all of which failed), and Sorenson 3 is not even an option in iMovie, although mp4 is available, as it is in FCP. (yes, i tried importing a full rez stream into Compressor, yes, i tried importing a full rez version into FCP and outputting from there.)

the mp4 is all squashed, not real widescreen, which i'm not happy about. i was thinking i would rather not release that version at all, but the feedback about not having an older codec version available was immediate.

which is funny, because in order to watch wmv stuff, i have had to pay flip4mac $9.99 and spend half an hour downloading. i know lots of mac owners who don't bother watching wmv compressions, but it just doesn't get complained about the same way.

[Sean McHenry]

Yeah, Apple is getting to be like some other software folks in that they are hiding their good stuff to make you accept the not so good stuff. I don't need or want i-Tunes but that's what they are throwing at everyone under the guise of QT 7.

Real was the first company to get sneaky like that. Try to find older versions of RealPlayer or god forbid the one nobody knows about, Real Player Enterprise - no pop-ups, or annoying connection to the net when you didn't want it, etc.

Anyway, sorry for the hijacking. Back to topic.

The quality of the entries is quite improved each time around I think. Folks are starting to take this seriously. At least I am, sort of.

Sean

[Keith Loh]

Actually, I quite like iTunes (now that I have an iPod) but I don't see any reason to cobble two programs together. That is called BLOAT.

[Jonathan Jones]

Meryem, I have used iMovie for pretty much everything as I hope to become familiar with FCP in the near future, but I have tons of export options out of iMovie, including Sorensen 3 which I have generally used for all my web exports (but maybe it is because I have the QT Pro key and always have - so I don't know what limitations are imposed without the pro key. If you don't have the pro key, I would recommend it, it offers a s-load of export options under the expert settings option.

I have alot of night scenes in low light, and I was really unhappy with the web compression in those scenes (nearly unwatchable) so I have been able to provide a number of links to various compression versions of my movie to suit various bandwidths - some compression images are better than others.

I plan to post a flash version also since I have the wildform flash plugins for my Quicktime settings, but I have to wait until I get my own laptop back from Apple (should be midweek) because the wf license won't seem to activate correctly on the loaner I got from Apple.

BTW, I really liked your movie - but I'll post a note on your feedback thread.
-Jon

[Nick Hiltgen]

Kinda glad to here that compression quality didn't effect the judges decision's too much. I was kind of disheartened watching all of these mmovies that have been compressed with h.264 and I used plain old sorenson 3 to keep the windows bretheren happy...

[Jonathan Jones]

Meryem,
nix what I said about getting the Pro key....sorry, you also mentioned that you do have FCP, but that it is just buggy under Tiger, - but it comes with the Pro key so you should have the extra export settings available to you in the expert settings of iMovie 'share' exporting.
-Jon

[Michael Wisniewski]

Originally Posted by Nick Hiltgen

... compression quality didn't effect the judges decision's too much ...

That's right, it doesn't. The story and entertainment value are what count. Like Ed said, every entry, entertained in some way, and that's what made these entries so good to watch.

[Michael Wisniewski]

Bits of advice for making judging easier:

1. Like Keith noted, just use a standard compression algorithm. Avoid stuff that's too new or obscure. It really does not affect voting. Standard Quicktime and Windows Media are perfect.

2. Give a downloadable link. It makes it easier to organize and review the entries. I usually download all the entries to hard disk before viewing.

[Keith Loh]

2. Give a downloadable link. It makes it easier to organize and review the entries. I usually download all the entries to hard disk before viewing.

We are in agreement there as well. Also, for any of you who embedded movies in pages, you must be able to count on your web server's reliability. A couple times I wanted to see a movie again but couldn't load a page. In general, I've found occasionally both Quicktime and Windows movies that are specifically embedded in a page sometimes don't load or crash the browser or fail to play a second time because of some buffer issue. Always provide secondary backup download link.