Ikan has recently announced their 2010 Short Film Competition in which one lucky contestant will win $10,000 in new video gear. Second and third places don’t fare too poorly, either, with prizes listed at $5,000 and $2,000 in gear, respectively. Best of all, there’s no entry fee.

This year’s contest focuses on the change in camera technology and the movement towards HDSLRs. Requirements include using an HDSLR camera and utilizing “the ikan name, logo or an ikan product in a creative, positive manner.” Lastly, the theme of your story must adhere to the word ‘revolution’. Seems easy enough, right?

In order to enter the competition, you’ll need to complete the following steps:

- Join ikan’s “HDSLR Revolution” vimeo group.

- Create your entry of no more than 3 ½ minutes.

- Upload your video to ikan’s “HDSLR Revolution” vimeo group.

- Send them a completed entry form.

- Kick back until the winners are announced December 15.

While you’re waiting to find out if you will be the owner of $10,000 worth of new video equipment, be sure to check out Videomaker’s “Contests” page for more information on upcoming video contests and film festivals.

The Videomaker/Canon Short Video Contest has gone to judging. We accepted 159 entries this year, and they are all being viewed.

My hope for sending all of the entries as H.264 files was dashed, though. While computer monitors are getting better all the time (and computers are also getting quicker), the thing that I didn’t consider was that only one of our editors has a way to watch H.264 directly on their TV. (One of us has a PS3, but ironically, the H.264 files worked better for that particular judge, as he is in Tokyo right now. But more on that later.) So I leveraged the power of TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress again to create some quick DVD-Video compliant files and threw them over to Encore for burning and menus. It worked out pretty well, though. All of the entries that were submitted as HD encoded very nicely, making for some of the nicest-looking DVD-Video footage we’ve seen in quite some time.

Although the machine we used to create those files? Sloooooow. I set up a big batch to encode overnight, and my workstation was only half-way through when I arrived at work the next morning. If you find yourself working on a contest in a technical capacity, it’s worth your while to ask about getting a nice dual-core machine. Trust me.