*Submissions may be made on miniDV tape or DVD or may be uploaded to our website.  Submissions made to the website will not be available for viewing and will be retrievable only by the website administrator.

*Tapes and DVDs must be postmarked no later than 3/01/10 to be considered for showing on A-kon® TV at A-kon® 21.

*Submitting content is not a guarantee of its airing on A-kon® TV.

*Please do not submit any work that is longer than 2 hours.

UNLESS

If your submission is more than 2 hours long, please break it into 25 minute episodes (at most) of a series.  This makes longer works much easier to work with when scheduling them.

*Do not mail us your only copy as we will not be returning your tape/DVD.

*By submitting your tape to A-kon® TV, you are giving us permission to show your work on the closed TV channel and the A-kon® DVD and to edit your work as we see fit to use for promos, clips, cover art, etc and you further understand that by voluntarily submitting your work to us that you will not receive compensation for your contribution.

*If we do air your program on A-Kon® TV you will receive full credit, so be sure to do a proper credit reel at the end of your program.  We will not alter credit reels in any way.

*Akon® TV staff will be screening submissions.  Entries that are not suitable for all audiences may be shown on the overnight schedule.  Questionable material may be edited to make it suitable for airing or may not be shown at all.

*PO Box info and upload info will be posted as soon as it becomes available.

We’ve come to the realization that there is far more potential for A-Kon® TV than simply showing panels and rebroadcasting of the Cosplay.  We think it’s time for you, the viewer, to become involved.

If you managed to find A-Kon® TV on channel 17 this year, you probably noticed that we altered our programming lineup a bit.  In fact, we showed no panels from this year or any other.  As it turns out, there were several reasons.  Not the least of them was when one of our editors looked at three separate voice actor panels and couldn’t tell them apart by anything other than what the panelists were wearing.

So we decided to go with some original programming instead of simply replaying all the panels we’ve shot for the past several years.

SO WHAT IS THE POINT?

We liked the idea of the fan film based TV channel that we’ve decided to issue a challenge to all of you.   We want YOU to start filming your stuff so we can show it.

Got an idea for a cosplay skit but the 2 minute deadline is too restricting?  Guess what, we don’t have a time limit (well, less that 30 minutes is good).  Got a great movie that you’ve made but nowhere to show it?  We got a place for you.

And if it is something that is truly spectacular, we’ll put it in the podcast reel.

So get out those cameras and start filming your masterpieces.

We frequently receive questions from convention attendees as well as from staff about how quickly they can watch the footage that we’ve filmed.   One question in particular seems to be about why it takes so long to get footage edited, and why it can’t be rebroadcast immediately after being filmed.

Unfortunately, getting video that has been shot from a MiniDV camera, such as the ones that we normally use, into a state that we can show on the television channel takes a fair amount of time.

The first step is to import the video from tape into a computer.  This is a real-time process, which means that if the video that has been shot is an hour long, it will take an hour to import it.  If there were two or more cameras that were simultaneously shooting the same shot, it will take that hour multiplied by the number of cameras.  So three cameras times one hour equals three hours.  Sometimes, this can be reduced by the number of input computers that are in use, but it will still take at least an hour.

The second step is to edit the video.  Sometimes this is a straightforward process.  In the case of something like a panel, it’s usually a case of adding a fade in at the beginning and a fade out at the end, since it’s usually one take with no cuts.  Two camera shots of the same panel will take longer because of the need to sync the multiple camera files and then to edit them all at once.  The sync process relies on both audio and visual cues and can be very time consuming if there is not an obvious one to use.  Multiple breaks in any of the camera files simply add to the editing time required.

The final step in getting the video that we shoot at the convention out to the TVs is time consuming on its own level.  Once we’ve managed to get the video input and edited, it has to be transported to the broadcast computer.  Unfortunately, due to the layout of the hotel and the locations of the broadcast computer and the production room for A-Kon® TV, this requires traversing at least three different elevators.  This is not made any easier or faster by the antics of the con attendees while trying to be cute.

Normal turnaround time for editing 1 hour of video shot from a single camera is about 4 hours, provided that nothing else comes up and there are no emergencies that require the editors to work on something else.