Posted on by Alec Soth

Las Vegas Birthday Slideshow (and book / sculpture)

I turned 40 last Wednesday. My wife took me to Las Vegas. I made a slideshow.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/8537213 w=600&h=452]

To see this video a little bit larger, go to the LBM A/V page.

I also made a book and sculpture. See them here. (And buy them here).

I hope you enjoy my midlife crisis…

25 Replies to “Las Vegas Birthday Slideshow (and book / sculpture)”

  1. Alec, I rejoice that you’re back blogging again. But I *implore* you, please stop with the Vimeo content or use your influence to get them to improve their technology so it doesn’t judder and jump in both the video and audio tracks. At one point I thought it was the HD-ness, but I’m not sure any more. And anyway, this show doesn’t seem to have any accessibility features that might allow me to try to turn HD off, if it’s on in the first place. My reference would be another service or (shudder) even Flash.

    …edN

  7. Any number of possible explanations from a) I’m outside the USA, b) connected wirelessly to cable modem, to… What I do know is that Vimeo is the only one of these services from which this problem arises and they have a Q&A in their FAQ about this problem which would indicate to me that it does happen in a significant number of cases. The solution, by the way, does not help me. But of course, do as you see fit.

  8. Brilliantly executed, here’s to Vegas, hookers, bowls and Bukowski. If I had a spare $4,100 I’m not sure if I’d buy the book, etc. or load up on all those $47 Special Rates. Toss up, art vs. er, well, art.

  9. Ed, Vimeo does require a bit more horsepower behind your machine. On our old 12″ G4 Mac videos are unwatchable. You can try to buffer the entire video before you watch it, but if your processor or cache are too slow that won’t help.

    In my experience they’re the only online video hosting site that doesn’t trample all over the video, audio and audio quality and the end user rights.

    1. I can certainly understand concerns around end user rights. Just for information, here are two links to Vimeo Help. The first outlines scenarios where playback problems may arise; I don’t know if this is an exhaustive list:

      http://www.vimeo.com/forums/topic:18488

      The second link takes you to the page of guidelines for encoding videos for upload such that they’re likely to play cleanly

      http://vimeo.com/help/compression

      I’ll assume Alec a ‘read the documentation’ kind of guy and has done all of this in his production (to the extent the instructions make sense and/or are feasible.)

      I’ll also assume that the reason I don’t see an HD / non-HD option button in the embedded viewer above is that this is not an HD clip. Don’t know why I assume that but… I’d expect to have problems with HD content on a Powerbook G4 even maxed out on RAM; it happens on YouTube too. But, on YouTube, turning off HD will always fix the problem and, frankly, I think HD in an embedded Flash player on a web page on a computer screen is pointless. (Maybe there’s a pun there; maybe not.)

      Thanks for the come back and attention. Please! Go back to regular programming.

      …edN

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