Chairman's Award ambiguity

[feliks_rosenber]

Hello everyone!

I'm not sure I'm posting this on the right forum but there's an issue with this year's requirements for the chairman's award submission.
I read the manual and it says the following:

The video format should be as follows....not more than 5 meg

You can see for yourself:
http://www.usfirst.org/uploadedFiles...20Criteria.pdf

The problem is that any decent video clip takes much more than just 5 megs. I don't know much about animation but it'd probably be the only option then because maybe animation takes less megs. I am quite sure there will be an update soon though. Otherwise, I don't see how anyone can compress a video into a tiny 5 meg file. Makes no sense!

Anyone got the idea behind this peculiar limitation ?

[R.C.]

Are you sure its not 5 min? Just a thought, not entirely sure myself.

[Jonathan Norris]

My guess is they meant to say 50 mb, which is far more reasonable. you can get a 3 minute video to look really good at 50mb. At 5mb it would look like a youtube video... and a bad one at that.

[JYang]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Norris

My guess is they meant to say 50 mb, which is far more reasonable. you can get a 3 minute video to look really good at 50mb. At 5mb it would look like a youtube video... and a bad one at that.

I agree with Jonathan Norris.
I think that FIRST will clarify this soon

[synth3tk]

5-minute MP3s are usually double that size (10-megs), so you really can't fit a *good* video into only five.

It can't be referring to minutes, as the requirements in that document state 3-minutes. So possibly they could've meant 50-megs, as suggested above. Hopefully FIRST will clear that up soon!

[Tetraman]

FIRST will at times make typos. They are just as human as we are. (except now in game hint season when they are big meanies)

If there is a mistake and they notice they will fix it - and if they don't see it, posting the quetion to FIRST is the way to go.

[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by Tetraman

FIRST (... is) just as human as we are.

There are zillions more volunteers than paid staff. We are FIRST.

[R.C.]

Originally Posted by Rick TYler

There are zillions more volunteers than paid staff. We are FIRST.

FIRST IS AWESOME, a program this big is unbelievable. The second I tell people about this, they are like "Such a thing exists or WOW!"

[feliks_rosenber]

So basically everyone agrees that this rule is far from being reasonable.
I'll ask on q&a then...

[RoboMom]

Originally Posted by Rick TYler

There are zillions more volunteers than paid staff. We are FIRST.

The issue of the 5 meg is on the radar screen of FRCteams and they will issue an update if needed.

Close to a zillion....

FIRST does publish statistics that can be used by teams for promotional brochures for their team and presentations.
http://www.usfirst.org/who/content.aspx?id=160

2008/09 season
over 195,000 students
53,000 mentors
32,000 event volunteers

Not published, but about 70 staff at HQ and in the field.

[JYang]

Has FIRST come out with a clarification on this issue yet? I was browsing through the site and it still seems to say 5meg everywhere and it has not been addressed by the Q&A forums or updates.