This; And also that

Scene from No Kings Day

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We marched with 20,000 powerful and peaceful protesters last Saturday, through the streets of my favorite town, down over to a space by the lake shore where the crowd could gather.

There was lady leading a great chant near us at one point along the way, and I looked over to see who the organizer was. It was a 70-year-old without a megaphone, by herself, just one person. Doing it.

“Whose streets?” she called. “Our streets!” we called back. And other great chants.

Her name was Christi. Not an organizer. Just part of the march. Someone else walking. A person with a voice.

“My mom was an opera singer,” she explained.

Man of Action

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If I order an egg bite I get 
my own little fork 
    a disposable hand     that fits my right hand.

Reading its palm I see a short life. But a good one.

Focus. Focus. 

I'm telling you, I'm not sitting around see,
waiting to see 
if the egg-bite-delivery guy brings me 
a little fork.

And then if he doesn't, I have to go get one while 
my egg bite cools. 

I mean: COME ON. 

That's not the life for me.

A couple

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surrounded by trees surrounded by
Pittsburgh ruins
that will be rebuilt

dressed
both in blue
with just enough quirk to their style
you know they put time and thought into it.

Waiting for the wedding photographer
and when you and your wife and daughter walk by
and you say:

“you are the best-dressed muggers I’ve ever seen.”
the guy says:

“That’s so nice. Give me your wallet.”

Your arm

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A were-child

a little were-girl with ponytails and
a bike with a basket and bell

can eat her own weight in about
an hour. Which doesn’t

sound like much but you know

that’s more than your arm, your leg,
your head.

Bean Curd

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It’s one thing when an adult calls one other adult, “Baby.”

But it’s a whole other can of bean curd when an adult calls one other adult, “Babies.”

“What’s happening, Babies?” he said to one other adult. And all hell broke loose.

People Fish

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The kids wrote “people fish exist” in chalk on the driveway and I don’t
know if that means “people, fish exist” or “people-fish exist.” But
there’s a big difference there.

Electricity

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I don’t mean to brag, but the electricity
in this coffee shop is just
exceptional.
My screen is showing colors
I’ve never seen before.
Silver-Red? What the hell is that?!
My keyboard is warm.
The CD eject button is borderline propulsive.
I’m not sharing this
outlet.

Hippies

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I’m talking with politics with my son (who has a heart as big as the
outdoors) and he says, innocently enough, “Hippies are people who don’t
live anywhere and sneak into people’s backyard, right?”

So, OK, he’s pro-hippie now. We’ve worked that out.

But close call, right?

Comparing Compressor Recipes for Vimeo and YouTube

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I spent a little time the other day running several different Compressor recipes so I could compare different compression options. I thought I’d share the results here, in case they’re of use to other folks on the interwebs. And of course, if you’re reading this and you spot anything that looks wrong, please shout out – corrections and additional input encouraged…!
For my test I was working with a 4:05 movie edited in Final Cut Express and sourced in AVCHD on my Canon HF100. I started by exporting it to a 2.4 Gig QuickTime file for archive purposes. The main attributes of my first test, which turned out to be a pretty good recipe for YouTube, particularly when in a time crunch, were:

  • bitrate max of 10,000
  • full resolution
  • left FPS as is
  • single-pass compression
  • deinterlace under the Frame Controls rather than Filter.

(Full specs on this later in the post, along with all the tests and a few notes on the results.)
A few top-line conclusions:
Deinterlace: Using the deinterlace filter in Compressor chewed up my text; using deinterlace under Frame controls worked like a charm.
Resolution: Dropping resolution by 50% hurt the image and softened text but didn’t really speed things up or shrink the file much, at least going from 1280 x 720 down to 640 x 360. Of course, there will be situations where you have to drop the resolution, but both YouTube and Vimeo suggest leaving HD resolutions at 1280 for HD, so in this case there was no reason to downsample.
Bitrate: Changing the bitrate had a direct impact on file size (2500 = half the file size of 5000) and a noticeable impact on the image, though going down to 2500, the image still looked pretty good for web video. YouTube currently suggests not capping bitrate, Vimeo requests that you set a max of 5000, which is what I did for example #6, below.
Multi-pass: Multi-pass adds a lot to encoding time (4X in this case) but did give me a higher contrast image with richer colors. So if time allows, it looks like multipass is better, but in a time crunch, single pass can work.

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