Robb Reid

Have to agree with the general sentiment here that the film festival racket is best likened to a lottery, whether it be shorts or feature films. And now on top of that I'd add to what Tyler mentioned in the other thread, unless your project is 'woke' or filled with blatant 'virtue signaling' your chances are even further diminished. While I consider myself a left leaning centrist I don't think these or any ideology political or otherwise should be used to screen out or exclude films that do not extol any agenda. In the past, writing and story came first and whatever message might be in the subtext was handled with subtlety and conscience but was still powerfully evoked. Today most often, it's driven home with a sledge hammer. This goes for many studio films now as well, but just check out the films being selected by most festivals especially shorts and if your going to even bother submitting best cover that base first.

The shite-storm over the last season of Game of Thrones was an unfortunate example of this - the compression artifacts were so extreme it was unwatchable. I recently re-watched the entire series on 4k UHD Blu-ray Dolby vision and it looked incredible. Most streaming services are prone to this, Netflix and Amazon 4k UHD are the exception. Even 4k uploads to YouTube can have significant banding. As far as camera files, especially properly exposed RAW I agree if your viewing on a decent monitor with as little compression as possible this should be a non issue. Phil has some good advice on encoding. That and Vimeo can produce better results.