Some IRTC judges were under the mistaken impression that sound was
prohibited. That's not the case.

The rules say that sound should be "ignored" by judges, in that it shouldn't
effect the score because it's the *animation* that's being judged, not the
audio.

The rules point out that, (at the time they were written), most people would
not be able to hear the sound if it were included. That's just a statement
of fact, but it's no longer the case today. It would be the same as saying
most people at the time would only have VGA monitors. It would be silly for
a judge to take that as an instruction that the monitor would have to be set
to 256 color mode before watching videos.

However, I've had one judge do exactly that - he wrote that since the
instructions used the word "ignored", that meant that the animation should
be watched *with the sound turned off*.

Then he deducted points from the animation because he couldn't
understand what the animation was about. :(

(The irony here was the sound was mixed so badly, he wouldn't have
understood the animation *with* the sound. But that's another story).

I wrote to the person in charge at the time, but he sort of shrugged it off.
He thought he rules were clear, and if the judges couldn't understand them,
what could he do?

The upshot of this is that, because the judges wrongly assume that
animations should be silent, animations with sound have been submitted with
subtitles, so they wouldn't get judged negatively.

Again, there was *never* an intent to prohibit sound from the IRTC
animations. It's fine that some people choose to use subtitles, but that
doesn't mean that it should be forced on others if they want to use sound.

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