Well, after about a week of swearing at this software and finally getting everything I wanted to do to it done, I have finally managed to encode the Anime Expo 2008 Idol Competition (thanks be to Nyaa Torrents for hosting the link).

It was a tough competition this year, everyone having practiced long and given their best; as such, I hope my efforts at taking this video honor their effort at least in some small way. It's a larger overall frame size, 704x400...I'm uncertain why the software determined that to be optimal, but it worked out well when I previewed it. Bitrate is about 3,500kb/sec at 24fps which should be DVD quality for those wish to transcode it. Unfortunately where we were recording from, what you see is the max magnification my camera was capable of. It's good enough, but I'd have really liked some better close ups of some of the participants. I'll have to see about getting a doubler later.

I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed shooting it.

We've had a massive deluge of spam recently. As such, we've needed to institute some precautions for the time being. All Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Hong Kong domains are blocked. A good portion of the IP address blocks from RIPE have been completely blocked. I know a few people on the forums are in those blocks. If I can figure out a way to make an exception, I'll do so. Until we find a better solution though this will stand. Also, we've had to clean out the forum users of bots entries...if you signed up and never posted before, you may have been deleted, and I am sorry about that. Also I'm sorry if I accidentally deleted you regardless. This was some very bad shit we had to deal with, and I do apologize if you need to sign back up.

However, this may be a moot point. While we seem to get a lot of traffic, we don't get a lot of forum posts. Truthfully it's to be expected since this is more of a hobby site than anything, but we put those things in there to be used. If they're not being used, they have no purpose. Therefore, we are seriously considering their removal. Just an FYI. We'll figure out how we'll place out contact info on the site conspicuously if we do take them down so we can be contacted if needed. Have a safe and happy holiday.

Well, finally after a lot of false starts and procrastination, I've finally completed the Anime Expo 2008 report for days 3 and 4. It was a fun time this year, and I can't wait for next year. Let's hope it'll be another good year for us all.