Feedback Poll

[hsapiens]

In the coming months, we'll be working to gather caps for post-14 challenges. This seems like an excellent time to poll all those who participate in the community (makers AND voters) for feedback as to how it's going thus far. beeej and I would appreciate it if you'd take a few minutes and give us some feedback. Thank you!

Comments

Image Quality in Caps

[hsapiens]

Thank you for mentioning this. This contest goes nowhere without good caps. Is this a problem with all of the caps or does this seem to be primarily a problem with caps from the early seasons (say, 1-3)?

I'm asking because the early seasons, my favorites, have sincere quality issues that I *think* are because of the medium they recorded on back in the day. We could solve the problem easily by keeping the focus on the seasons that have better image quality. If, however, this is a problem even with the later season caps then we need to consider using hi-def caps.

We'd gone with the resolution that elfcat255 could get from her DVDs because it's about what is available at a lot of my fave SG-1 cap resource sites and she's particularly talented at capturing expressions and postures that lend themselves to great icons. I valued that more highly, especially since I have no idea how to make hi-def caps. Though I suspect partly it involves a DVD-ROM that reads in hi-def. I'm woefully ignorant on the technical aspects of capping & resolution vs. image size. I haven't seen HD SG-1 DVDs, though, so I'm assuming it has more to do with the cappers' equipment. Also, those hi-def caps are typically also much larger dimensionally and I worried about uploading them to Photobucket, as well, since it likes to re-size images. I have a ton of unused web space and bandwidth, though, so I could move the caps to my own webspace if needed. (I'm thinking out loud at you right now so please feel free to ignore.)

However, none of this is meant to say I wouldn't consider changing. I'm open to learning and to changing anything I can that doesn't work or that needs improvement.

Thank you for the compliments. It's especially valued when coming from someone who runs a LIMS, too, and knows the challenges involved. My hope here is to solicit criticisms, even if they're nit-picking but especially if they're important like image quality, because I want to provide the most bang for the work put into running it. :)

Re: Image Quality in Caps

[hsapiens]

Oh, I didn't take you to be saying it was the capper's fault. Even if I had thought that, the mods are the ones with the final say on cap selection so the buck still stops with us.

Cap selection is one of my weak spots. Left on my own, I'll pick the pretty and clear but boring single character head shot 98 times out of 100. I know that I have limitations on differentiating what I can work around from what an icon maker of more experience can work around. The link and explanation are extremely helpful to me in gaining confidence about what is an acceptable issue (for instance, a dark or tinted cap can still make a great icon if you know how to lighten or color correct. But that's a matter of knowledge and experience). It's why I was so eager to have a more sophisticated eye involved in cap selection and it's why I want feedback exactly like this.

I wanted to be certain that we're talking about exactly the same thing because I did have some real concerns about image quality for caps from the first few seasons. I'm very fuzzy on the terminology and how the resolution vs. size of an image affects quality. I wanted to be certain we're talking about the same thing so that I get your point. Again, your linking to the cap & discussing it is *extremely* helpful for me. Thank you. :)

I now see exactly what you're talking about. I missed that completely when we were selecting caps but I sure did wrestle with it in (trying to) make icons. I am thinking that for future action/dark shots, we should see if an HD version is available.

I just thought I'd mention it

And I'm very grateful that you did! There's no point in asking for feedback if everyone thinks that it's not okay to mention things exactly like this. Feedback is *useless* if the only comments are, "You're doing great; keep on doing what you're doing."

Seeing the theme of other comments here, if you did offer less caps (which I am against personally) I think this would be more of an issue - that cap didn't get used in much of the submitted icons, from what I can tell.

I am against it personally, too. I like having a lot of choices for creativity purposes and it also covers my backside without unduly penalizing participants when I *do* let through a cap I later regret. However, I acknowledge that some makers find it gets their creative juices flowing better to have to deal with a cap that isn't obvious to them and so find that a more difficult but nonetheless inspiring sort of challenge. If lots of people think it's a good idea I'm willing to entertain the idea of a more limited number of caps, but I'd never trim it to below 5 or 6.

Thanks, again, for the kind words. I'm assuming that we're doing a reasonably good job because we haven't had a lot of drop-outs and we're getting amazingly creative entries every week (which makes me think that people aren't bored by the contest). However, there's always room for improvement and this is our first shot at this so I wanted to get some specific feedback -- which is the point of LIMS, of course. ;-)