A good enough lust fantasy?

My sister and I went to a concert, "An Evening of Romantic Music", by the UTD Musica Nova (I was part of it before, and still guest perform with them occasionally). They played works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Barber, and even Bernstein. My favorite piece is this "Lust Fantasy" (I believe it's called? **) by Robert Xavier Rodriguez (also the director of Musica Nova), performed by Jeff Lankov on the piano.

(** It's Fantasia Lussuriosa in Italian)

If you don't have time (or patience/interest/whatever) to watch the whole clip, at least forward to the 5:00 mark (close to the middle of the clip but not quite... it's about 12 min long) for an interesting twist on the performance.

The original file was huge... like 250MB. I used Helix Mobile Producer to convert it to H.264, reduced the frame size from VGA to QVGA, and the bitrate from almost 3Mbps to less than 500kbps. The resultant file is less than 40MB, and I tried uploading it to youtube but forgot that besides the 100MB size limit they also had a 10min time limit. Vox is better in this regard!!

Playback of the two files on the N95 don't look too different. However if you do a seek, you can see the smaller file has less I-frames and so you get ghost-images for a couple of seconds if you seek to a non I-Frame (I think I set it to every 5 sec.). And of course since the resolution is different, the first file will look better output to TV, although I haven't tried.

I'm not a good pianist by any means, but playing the piano is one of the best ways I can find to relax. It has been a tense weekend with tax returns and all, so I'm glad I had the piano for company. Plus I wanted to see if the AV Sync issue has been fixed with the firmware update. (Yes, it has!) If you like Evanescence and are brave enough to hear my playing, here's the piano part of "Good Enough":

Evanescence - Good Enough (Piano)

6 comments

Same edits were made with HMP as with the previous clip. While the AV Sync and audio gain are much improved, I really don't care for the washed-out effect. It's as if someone turned the EV way up (in photos too). I think the retail version of the firmware doesn't have this problem though (which is good). Mine is supposed to be a newer version but apparently they changed something in the wrong direction.

I guess then these are not very good examples of N95's video capabilities? Oh well, just an excuse to share some piano music. Hope you like the first one and can tolerate the second....