Mash Pit Comedy is NZ's first comedy video mash-up site.

Mash Pit Comedy will get your hilarious video creations on TV.

The most popular stuff on the site will receive fame, glory (and prizes!) when selected to appear on the Mash Pit Comedy TV show on Prime.

Mash Pit Comedy is a video-sharing site where members can upload original comedy. Members can also download any video on the site and mash that up with any of their own footage and re-upload that new video to the site.

The site keeps track of videos you've downloaded so that when you upload a mashed video you can nominate which videos you used in the mash. It's all about sharing and tracking how comedy videos change through the mash cycle.

Mash Pit Comedy is all about getting social with your comedy.

Absolutely! Membership to Mash Pit Comedy is free. Always will be. Sign up now.

The best and most popular comedy clips on the Mash Pit Comedy website will be selected to appear on the Mash Pit Comedy TV show on Prime. There will be 4 x half-hour episodes in the first series.

The best clips on the TV show will be in the running for “Best Of” prizes. Read more on our TV page.

Fame! Glory! Adulation! If you're really funny you're likely to get people lusting after you. It's a scientific fact.

Oh, you might be lucky enough to win some impressive prizes too. Read more on the TV page.

Anything you make yourself that YOU think is funny.

The power is in your hands.

You can't put video on the site that you don't own. So for example, you can't put TV shows on the site. You can't put music on the site that you don't own.

As a member of the site you warrant that you own (or have a licence from whoever owns) all the material in your video, including:

• footage
• music
• jokes and lines
• performances
• people's images and voices
• artwork and graphics

If you don't have these rights, don't put your stuff up.

We like funny stuff, but we don't want to see video that features: swearing of the really bad kind, bullying, abuse, personal attacks or disrespectful behaviour, racism, sexism, harassment, threats, profanity, vulgarity, obscenity, pornography, illegal or unlawful conduct, defamation.

We love low-fi comedy that you've made yourself.

Read more about our Key Rules and our Terms of Use.

We've created a library of tracks that you can download and use in your videos. Aren't we nice. Check out the Sounds from the Mashpit profile page for the wide selection of music stings, drum fills, weird noises and sound tracks.

If you download a track and use it in your video, remember to tick ‘this is a mash' and select the relevant clip you used when you upload your mash.

Anything you upload to the site can be downloaded and edited by another site member into a video they're creating. So don't put anything up on the site that's really precious to you.

In becoming a member of the site you agree that if you download video from the site, then you won't put that video on any other video-sharing site (eg Youtube etc). It can only be mashed up and re-posted to Mash Pit Comedy. Keep it in the Mash Pit Comedy family.

Of course if you're the original creator of a video clip and you own all the content in it and it contains no video downloaded from the Mash Pit Comedy site, then you can put it other places too. But once you start downloading videos from this site and using content other people created, we ask that you only put those videos back here.

• Pre-downloading and mashing, making videos you've made totally yourself = You can upload those videos to Mash Pit Comedy and any other site
• Post-downloading and mashing, making videos made up of various clips from this site which other people created, so it's not all your content = You can only upload those videos back to Mash Pit Comedy.

The great thing about Mash Pit Comedy is that you can feature any site video on your own blog or website by pasting the embed code (check out the Share tab under the video player). And you can share any video on the site with all your fans/friends/frenemies on Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace, Friendfeed ... or whatever the latest cool and hip social site is. Totes.

We prefer these kinds of video files: .mov .wmv .avi .mpg .3gp But the uploader can accept other video files too. Give anything a go.

Keep your comedy clips short. Under 5 minutes please. Even shorter! Fast comedy is good comedy.

Grab our attention in the first few moments of your video. Don't bore your viewers! Attention spans are very very tiny on the web.

If it makes you laugh, odds on we'll all find it funny too.

Some technical tips (WARNING! Don't get overwhelmed by the tech specs, the site will accept a wide range of video clip files, so upload whatever you've got and see if it works):

• Shoot in ‘progressive' mode.
• Film your video full-screen, ideally 16:9 aspect ratio.
• Use a low-compression codec like H.264 with 25 fps.
• De-interlace your video before you encode it too.
• Make sure your video file is less the 100MB big.
• Read more on our Video Tips page.

Yep. Read all about iMovie tips here.

Yep. Read all about Windows Movie Maker tips here.

We recommend Windows Movie Maker users install the Mash Pit Comedy Windows Movie Maker movie setting profiles we've created, which makes publishing your video easy as pie.

We're going to make a TV show out of the best clips on the site, which will be a combination of original clips and mashed clips on the site. Because we want the video quality to be as good as possible and to ensure a good viewing experience for the TV viewers, we've decided to try to standardise the mashing format. We've made all the downloaded clips adhere to the 16:9 screen resolution format (ie 1024x576 pixels). So if a clip was originally uploaded in the 4:3 format, then the downloaded clip will look stretched to fit the 16:9 screen. The trade-off is that specific footage looks a bit fatter (hey, TV adds a few pounds anyway), but it'll be best for the whole project in the long run.

We encourage everyone to upload 16:9 full screen resolution footage to the site because that's best for mashing, but if you've got other video resolution we're not going to turn you away.

Mash Pit Comedy has been built and optimised for these web browsers:

• Windows XP: IE 7, Firefox 3
• Mac OSX Leopard: Safari 3, Firefox 3

If the site is looking a bit broken on your browser, check what version you’ve using (go to Help > About on your browser’s toolbar). You may need to upgrade to a newer version of your browser. It’s FREE to upgrade.

A bunch of creative and technical folk from Wellington production company The Gibson Group

Our fantastic broadcast partner is Prime TV – because Mash Pit Comedy is not your usual TV sketch comedy show.

Mash Pit Comedy has been funded by NZ On Air's digital content partnership fund. Thanks NZ on Air!

Full project credit list here.

Sign up to our email updates. Get notified of new competitions, win prizes and be the first to hear about great comedy posted on the site. You'd be a fool not to.

Sign up here: Mash Pit Comedy via Google Feedburner

Have you checked out our About Us and TV pages?

If you're still a bit confused, please get in touch with us:
feedback@mashpitcomedy.com

Happy playing in the Pit.