No doubt. There are so many terrific articles that have been written that tell you step by step how to capture video with a capture card, how to make Halo movies, ETC., that it’s ridiculous. People are just lazy there sometimes and want other people to come to their thread to answer their question without reading up first. I’m somewhat guilty myself, but at m.com it was (haven’t been there lately) ridiculous.

My big gripe with forums is that they’re either flowing over the top with dialogue (and inevitably petty arguments that don’t seem so petty at the time) or they’re dead. I think it comes with the territory though, at least with machinima - people go to work on a movie and just kind of do that because they don’t have the time to post I think. But yeah, I’m with you on the persistence of information thing too. There are a few good forums that I’ve read up on when in search of answers by people who have already been there and done that.

Some of it may be inversely proportional to my having somehow mutated into a regular weekday blogger; the kinds of conversations I tended to start up in a forum, I tend to deal with here instead, and there’s enough back-and-forth between the comments and the emailed feedback to scratch the same discussion itch for me.

I’m not Mr. Down With Forums or anything like that; I’ve just grown fatigued of their recurring behavior patterns, and my own contributions to those patterns.

I have tried it once or twice in the past, but the media heavy (slow to load) pages, use of popup windows, ads before movies that would play over the movies’ audio, etc. sort of put me off of it. If they have improved it, maybe it is worth taking a look at again.

Oddly enough my interaction with the site was somewhat opposite; I occasionally went there for the forums, but after my interaction with the video portion of the site, discounted it and stopped looking. Unfortunately while there seems to be forum traffic, there doesn’t seem to be much discussion that I find interesting. The repetitions of people asking “how do I make halo videos” or “how do I capture video” — while understandable — somewhat put me off of actually trying to start a discussion on the site.

What I am most curious about is why you are disillusioned with forums. Although the machinima related ones do seem to be overly quiet, what do you think would be a better substitute?

I realize that a lot of conversation goes on in Skype or via other such chats, but scheduled, announced events like the machinima audio conference aside, I think this is somewhat unfortunate. Forums have the benefit of persistence of information. Someone new to machinima may come to them years later and find something interesting that was written. This is for the most part impossible for real-time conversations (be they Voice, IRC, etc.), and mostly impractical with things like weblogs, where old content gets buried and lacks categorization. Sites like Wikis may be information heavy, but lack the feeling of personal interaction and time-sensitivity that members of a community want.

If you are trying to build and serve an online community, I really think that there is nothing better than a well run, active discussion forum. It has the benefit of allowing everyone to participate and have their say, rather than just whomever is on your buddy list, or subscribed to your RSS feed. It also keeps information archived for the future, in a readily accessible manner.

“I hereby acknowledge that by submitting my video, I grant Machinima.com a non-exclusive license (not ownership) to display, promote, or modify my video and the information in the submission form herein, in whole or in part, in any form or format now in existence or yet to be invented (Flash, WMV, PSP, etc.), on Machinima.com and its affiliate and partner sites and networks.”

The video quality issue is great to hear - although it’s not hard to beat YouTube quality.

Your insights into things always seem to be, well, insightful. Hearing you say all of this makes me raise a brow and almost want to take a second look myself. I recently checked out their “Inside Halo” series which seemed to be a bit… gamey? But then I realized who was voicing the host: SodaGoD, who happened to be one of my machinima heroes when I first started up. If you’ve never seen his “Pie” series, I have to recommend it. Some of the most bizarre and creative stuff I’ve ever seen done with Halo.

Question about m.com’s YouTube channel (which is a question probably better directed towards them) - do they put all of the movies submitted to m.com on their YouTube?

Oh, and I checked out the iPhone / Lynch short. Definitely my YouTube favorite of the week! It’s pretty interesting though, he talks a lot about the rise of digital video (and iPod in particular) being a generally great thing for film in “Catching the Big Fish.” I personally have “Superbad” on my iPod, but I saw it first on a good screen with a good sound system, but that’s OT - and probably not the kind of film he had in mind when he said that!