I received an email yesterday regarding the IPF National Audio Visual (AV) Championships, which are taking place in the middle of October, and it set me thinking. There were two reasons why it did. One is that the championships are being held in Clondalkin, so not a million miles from home. The second is that one of the prizes is for the best first-time entrant in the competition, and a prize like that makes a competition like this a bit more accessible to someone, like me, who hasn’t dabbled too much in AV – at least not to the level that the experienced members of the IPF AV group are likely to have reached. So to enter, or not to enter?
There are a couple of downsides to entering. The first is time. Both preparation time and the time needed to attend the competition. The latter is more of a concern – there’s a good chance I won’t be free that weekend, and even if I am, with many other weekends in September and October currently booked up with photography-related tasks, I may not want to devote another weekend to one. But on the flip side, even if I enter, there’s no requirement on me to attend (although I would, presumably, get most value out of attending to see both what other entrants have submitted and what the judges might have to say about my entry).
The preparation time is less of a concern, but still a consideration. The rules require that the presentation be entered as a .exe file, and I gather it needs to play in GlobFX Player. Any AV presentations I’ve done have used Soundslides, which creates a Flash slideshow, so there may be a learning curve in getting one of those converted to a .exe file. But this isn’t an insurmountable problem.
The question that arises, of course, is what I would enter. If I was to enter, I wouldn’t create an AV presentation from scratch, but would likely submit the slideshow I did of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade earlier this year – which I’ve published on the blog previously. The photo at the top of this post is one used in that slideshow, and was captured on the morning of the parade in the preparation area.
Submitting this slideshow would mean less work for me, in that it’s a pre-existing AV presentation that would just need conversion, and also has the advantage of not having any copyright issues since the audio I use in it is original audio that I recorded on the day. That itself might give it an edge over something using commercial music, although I really don’t know how much weight each element of the presentation gets in the final judging.
I guess that is the biggest issue – the fact that the whole competition is one I haven’t experienced before and that the area of AV presentations in the IPF is unknown to me.
Somewhat conveniently, next week in Dublin Camera Club we’re being shown some AV presentations by people who are members of the IPF AV group, so I’ll have a better idea after that if my St. Patrick’s Day slideshow is even remotely close to being suitable material for the IPF National Championships.
If I feel it is, I’ll still have a few weeks to get it converted to the right format and submitted into the competition. If not, well at least I might have a better idea of what is suitable for entry into next year’s championships. Either way, I’ll keep you posted about that status of my entry (or lack of entry) into the 2010 competition.
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