As you might know, the biggest free hobbyist/community filmmaking competition on the net is DVXUser’s. There are usually two such competitions every year. The current competition, titled “Timefest” because the key element is time, is now open for viewing. I spent most of the day watching the ~70 entries. You can view the entries here, login info here.

I must say that except two entries, the ones titled “O2” and “RPDM“, the rest pretty much sucked. Sure, there were a few more that were watchable, like “Survival”, “Unzeit”, “Parallel”, “The Small Multiple” and 1-2 more, but for the most part, the vast majority of these entries were pure cheesy suckiness. I remember a year ago, the SpyFest competition, that had at least 5 entries good enough to become full featured films. This time around, there’s a lot more people who entered the competition, but I couldn’t find truly amazing films (except the “O2″ and “RPDM”). This time seems to be about quantity over quality.

The suckiness experienced is not just about the actual camera movement, framing or dialog, which are the artistic part of each movie, but in the technical parts too: overexposed subjects, terrible audio quality, bad exporting quality (someone even exported in QVGA at 12 fps), interlacing, what have you. All the shit is there. There were about five HV20-based entries too, among the worse of the overall bunch I must say (I am sorry if any of these HV20 directors reads this, but I got to write my opinion).

Someone could say to me “oh, at least we tried, where is your entry Eugenia?“. Well, that’s the thing you see. If I know that I can’t do something really well, I simply don’t do it. Or, if there’s no way to make it better, I do it, and I publish it on Vimeo, but if I notice that the result is not up to high standards of an international competition I simply don’t submit it to one. But I certainly won’t release a movie for a well publicized competition and have people laugh at me at the end.

And as for the exporting, gosh, do it right. DVXUser requires up to a 6 minute video, h.264/AAC encoding, and up to 50 MBs of a MOV/MP4 filesize. Now, to achieve this, is pretty easy. Export like this:
- From a miniDV widescreen camera export at 720×400 at 1024 kbps h.264 and 128kbps AAC.
- From an HD camera export at 848×480 at 1024 kbps h.264 and 128kbps AAC.
- From the DVX100 camera export at 852×480 at 1024 kbps h.264 and 128kbps AAC.
For the HD and DVX cameras, if you are not happy with the quality you get, or if you shot at 30p/60i instead, you can go down to 640×360 using the same bitrate. If your film is shorter than 6 minutes, you can upgrade the video bitrate a tiny bit, just enough to gain some additional quality without running over the 50 MB limit. And for God’s sake, remove pulldown if you shot in PF24, and de-interlace if you shot in 50i/60i. Nobody wants to see your horizontal lines on their media player.

UPDATE: What do you know. The “O2″ short movie used the same set that was used on Firefly’s 3rd episode, titled “Bushwhacked”. Pictures here.