Can Light-O-Rama Annual Contest deadline be pushed back to Tuesday? NO MAIL ON MONDAY!

[Guest guest]

Many of us working in a crunch to get our CDs out to Lightorama in time for Monday's deadline found out that there is no mail delivery this Monday due to Martin Luther King day.

Dan, can you extend the deadline by one more day, to Tuesday in order to allow our mailed disks to arrive to you in time?

When you set the final date to receive entries as a holiday, you'll probably miss out on good number of entries that would hav earrived on that date.

I can assure you we did not plan to wait until the last minute, but with the bombshell landing in my lap this week of my temrinally ill mom returning to the states for emergency treatment, then my HDD finally burnt out, it created a huge delay in our efforts to get the videos completed.

[Guest guest]

Im, very sorry to hear that Jeff.

I already sent mine but, I see what you mean. I'd bet that Don would change that, because of the holiday

Your mother is in my prayers.

[Guest guest]

ndiaz wrote:

I'd bet that Don would change that, because of the holiday

You meant Dan, right?

[Guest guest]

Yea, sorry I got confused for a second. But wouldn't you like to be Dan for a day?

[Guest guest]

ndiaz wrote:

Yea, sorry I got confused for a second. But wouldn't you like to be Dan for a day?

Yes and no. I'll take the praise, but not the headaches.

[Guest guest]

Jeff

You can always upload it to Youtube and just send in the link?

Sorry to her about your mom.

[Guest guest]

I'm very dissapointed with youtube quality. It's a good site, but for rapidly changing lights synchronization, it messes up the timing once in a while even when I feed it the highest quality DIVX 320 x 240.

What I sent on my CD disk was DIVX in a 640 x 480, that does not have any artifacting introduced by YouTube, who one in a while their algorythm makes it look like your lights are not syched exactly.

[Guest guest]

I just start posting a few days ago but have not notice any sync problems. I will have to keep an eye on it.

[Guest guest]

I did move the deadline to Tuesday.... I made a mistake when I set the date and did not realize the significance of Monday the 15th.

[Guest guest]

Thanks Dan! You da man!

Hey, HPHP, you'll probably load up many videos on Youtube before you see this issue. It happens in about 1 in 10 videos for me, and usually on the faster videos like Wizards In Winter. It loses about 1/10th of a second of sync, then corrects itself before the song is over. So at first it looks like your LOR sequence stinks and that you did a lousy job on it, even though the DIVX vidoe you uploaded looks perfect. I already got one bad comment on one of my videos for this.

It's an artifact of their conversion to Flash format. I've seen other people complain about it on the YouTube forum.

[Guest guest]

The YouTube FAQ's state that if you have audio sync issues, it means you're using an unsupported format. I usually upload WMV and haven't had any issues, although I haven't uploaded that much yet.

-Tim

[Guest guest]

The format of my videos, which is DIVX, is not an unsupported format, it's their most highly recommended format. If you look on YouTube's technical guide:

http://youtube.com/t/help_cat05

It clearly states: "We recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 320x240 resolution with MP3 audio, at 30 frames per second. Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your clips look better on YouTube. "

That is exactly what I give them.

So that is not the reason. The reason is they just don't want to admit that you lose qulaity when you convert from high end DIVX to FLASH. Ask any professional videographer, they would never in a million years master their video only to have it end up as a flash format.

[Guest guest]

Agreed, their quality is pretty bad. I started out with a low-res WMV format, which looked moderately bad, and on YouTube it looked even worse. I suppose they have to do that so they're bandwith bills don't get any more astronomical than they already must be...

-Tim

[Guest guest]

Light-O-Rama Dan:

I also wanted to make sure your computer is setup to view DIVX (.AVI) videos, as this is the format of the videos I sent you on my CD. They are DIVX 640 x 480. Some people use the DIVX reader software, or if you're using Pinnacle to create movies, which is what I used, it most likely already has the DIVX installed for you.

Windows Media Player can play DIVx .avi movies, but you need the codec for it which only takes 30 seconds to download:

http://www.divxmovies.com/codec/

As you install it, just check off the codec part and it will install it to your computer, then WMP will play the movies.