I guess my assumption was that the "spitfire team" would be a lot of their employees and interns doing the first round of filtering and probably skip right to the genre switch and see whether people recognized that or not. That's why I felt like they specifically chose this scene as the challenge. but who knows. It does boggle your mind looking at the math though.
More or less how I expect it to be done. If I'm listening around for good entries, I'll listen for 5 seconds starting around where they get shot at in the intro. If it's incredibly boring or misplaced, I'll move the time marker to where Caleb trips and listen another 5. If it's also boring, I'll skip again to the chase right after his trip. And if
that too is boring, then onto the next video. Thus I give a video about 15 seconds of listening, plus or minus a few, to know whether it's decent or not. If it ain't decent, it ain't got a chance to be a winner, so into the dustbin. If it
is good, or stands out, then (if I were a judge) I'd place it into a higher category, one that deserves more review time, probably by a different person. Etc.
I expect they'll have a pool of 100 or so truly excellent entries by the last few days of judging. Then it will be hard to decide amongst these as they will all be so incredibly good, that they'll probably start removing entries for having a mistake or a weak moment, until they can distill it down to only a handful, of which they'll pick 6.
The big judges (the named ones who are celebrities of certain standing) will almost definitely only be involved once there are 100 (or less) entries in the pool. They're busy people and there's no way they'd have time to watch all these videos even for 15 seconds, let alone to completion. So that's how I'd run the judgement process logistically. There would also be guidelines as to how the assistant judges would make decisions about musical quality, and ideally they'd have some level of knowledge of film music to be able to be critical and decide what works and what doesn't.
). 
