I had a brilliant new movie idea go awry this past weekend -- I tried to cross "Three Men and a Baby" with "Two and a Half Men" and ended up with "Two and Three-Quarters Men and a Half a Baby."

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.

A little twist in the ongoing Virtual LP story this week. After a few years of recording fun, including collaborations with swell folks like Yaniv Soha, Jake Vortex and the notorious eb, MC DD von H, Shonny Vortex, Power Vortex, and others, I've gone and joined a band.

We've been messing around with various tunes, including a few of the tracks on this site, some new ones, and the occasional cover. (We've playing "I'm in Love with a Girl" recently and I'm hoping we get to record that soon.)

We've been calling ourselves "The Reuben Kincaid," a name uke-master Christian Crumlish came up with about 15 years ago, and a few of us fell for in a "boy, if we ever have a band..." kinda way. So really, TRK has existed in that "if we ever have a band" part of our minds since the mid-90s.

In addition to uke-master Crumlish, TRK features "So-Called Bill" Cassel on bass, Ryan "don't call me Bryan" Short on bongos, and me on guitar and sometimes keys.

Here's our very first track, a tune called "Single Cell Critter" that just may be the angriest song about a sea full of bacon ever written.

time: 2:09 seconds; specs: 5.2M
Press Play to play.

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.

I posted a different kind of movie (for me) over the weekend -- a 4 minute micro-documentary in which my buddy Joel and I get a tour of our pal Kirk's chicken house followed by a look at how Kirk makes olives.

It features: fearsome fowl, sleight of hand, spontaneous slurry stirring, and little bit of shtick. Also, chicken trivia. It was a lot of fun to make -- hope you enjoy it.

-Cecil

Here's another track for Der Virtual LP in a blatant attempt to capitalize on the recent media frenzy surrounding Ira and my cover of "Welcome to the Working Week."

This one's called "I Cook It 2 It" and it's, well, it's sort of a hippity hop version of a recent blog post about me cooking.

Wearing a chef's hat when I do it,
-Cecil

time: 1:10 seconds; specs: 1.6M
Press Play to play.

Here's the latest addition to the Der Virtual LP. Ira Vortex (better known to some as so-called "So-Called Bill") and I have started playing tunes of late. Mostly originals, including a few chestnuts from the VLP, but also a few covers. This 'uns our first recorded venture, with Ira on bass as well as co-producing -- it's sorta of a jazzy hepster-ish version of Elvis Costello's ode to spending money and getting so convinced.

In related news, Ira and I have also joined forces with the infamous Xian and the soon-to-be-infamous Ryan to forge a fearsome four-piece called "The Reuben Kincaid." Watch this space for TRK tracks TK.

Waiting for your family's big day to arrive,
-Cecil

time: 2:15 seconds; specs: 3.1M
Press Play to play.