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PeiJu Chien-Pott (Lotus), a principal dancer for Martha Graham Dance Company, and David Patrick Kelly (Lone Peak), a veteran actor of stage and screen who is best known for his role as Luther in “ The Warriors“, get lost in the wasteland of poor writing. The principal performers do their strident best to bring intensity to the battle, but most line readings feel too much like canned sound, rather than authentic interactions. Left: David Torok (Doug Pince), center: Jasmine Chiu (Little Phoenix), right: Ji Tuo (Little Dragon). If these song moments could have embraced a Cirque du Soleil feel and balletic sense of wonder, the vocals and lyrics might have brought our heart into play, but as it stands, Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise grinds to a halt far too often. You get the sense that the creators had such a strong belief in the power of these songs that nothing else was needed, but they are sadly misguided. This is especially true during the musical numbers which lacked any visual appeal and connectability. I just wish the creators had taken this element, a dynamic that fits so well in The Shed‘s towering space, and expanded the aerial gymnastics with more creative fluidity and graceful motion. Some of the visual aerial creations are beautiful and thrilling to register, giving us moments of ocular joy as warriors float like fallen angels in a majestic aquarium. Ultimately, the saving moments of grace come from the martial arts choreography by Zhang Jun which is co-currently well orchestrated but never fully rises up to the same level as the video promos suggest. As directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise stumbles forward aerobically, stalling the momentum with arrangements of songs by Sia (with additional remixes by composer, musician, and producer Arca), messy and inarticulate movement choreography by Akram Khan, and campy wooden vocal and line reading performances by its tenacious cast. Courtesy The Shed.Īs the rock and scaffolding landscape is unveiled, the overly simplistic mythology unfolds with a determination for grandness. PeiJu Chien-Pott (Little Lotus) with members of the chorus (guardians of the House of Dragon). Co-conceived by “ Kung Fu Panda” screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, the story is almost Shakespearean in texture and construction, and although you can feel their steadfast belief in its wildly spectacular importance, the entertainment piece falters in its dialogue and its presentation, reducing what could have been awe-inspiring to chuckles of uncomfortable laughter for its juvenile clumsiness. Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise, the kung fu musical conceived and directed by Chen Shi-Zheng and commissioned for The Shed’s opening season, tackles the air space with determination. The height and depth invigorates unbelievably, giving almost endless panoramas and a broad canvas to paint an experience that is only restricted by ones imagination and expertise. The Shed’s McCourt Theater is as perfect a space for this kind of theatrical endeavor as one could image. Expansive, just like the Park Avenue Armory, but with the added technology and contraptions that will elevate any creative mind into something magically undiscovered and inspiring. If you have Elgato’sĮyeTV ( ) DVR software installed, the Media Browser will also show you TV shows that EyeTV has archived.Toast is an optical disc authoring and media conversion software application for macOS and classic Mac OS. Instead of the drawers, you’ll now find a Media Browser, a floating window that gives you access to the music, photos, and video content you want to put on disc, showing you the contents of your iPhoto library, for example, or your Movies folder. The developers have also reworked the interface, removing the clunky drawer motif of Toast 7 and cleanly exposing all of the major features. Scaling text effects inside the Toast window show you what kind of files you can manipulate using the different data, audio, video, and copying features of Toast. Roxio has taken pains to simplify the interface. With all this new functionality you might expect Toast 8 Titanium to be more difficult to use, but you’d be wrong. And Toast can even recover files from damaged discs-it can read data from CDs and DVDs that the Finder can’t decipher. Toast now keeps track of which files you’ve stored on which burned discs using the accompanying DiscCatalogMaker RE application, so you can locate content more easily once you’ve offloaded it and put the disc away. Toast installs a small Mac OS X- and Windows-compatible application called Roxio Restore alongside the archived data, so when you want to recover files you’ve backed up to CD or DVD, you don’t need Toast to make it happen-you just need the disc itself. As before, you can span data across more than one CD or DVD. Toast 8 Titanium works better as a file archival and backup system in this new version, too. But as I write this, Apple hasn’t yet built in support for Blu-ray drives, which means you must install software on your Mac to get a Blu-ray drive to work. Each 5.25-inch dual-layer Blu-ray disc can store up to 50GB of data, compared to 4.7GB of data on a single-layer DVD-R disc. It would be handy if there were a way to automate this entire workflow.īlu-ray, Sony’s high-definition optical disc format, is gaining traction as a consumer product, but it’s also appearing as a computer storage format, and it’s not hard to understand why. For example, once my TiVo content is on my hard drive, I still need to tell Toast to rip the video to a format that my PSP understands. TiVoToGo doesn’t completely automate the process of converting video, though. But Toast 8 Titanium is still the best Mac application out there for exporting video to a wide range of different formats. Though I could massage it a bit using Toast’s extensive options, I still had a hard time getting results that satisfied me. Handbrake -images were often darker and less distinct. I found the quality of video converted and exported by Toast 8 Titanium to be lower than I could achieve on my own with applications like Unfortunately, the actual quality and speed of video output still leaves something to be desired. You can wake up in the morning and find last night’s episode of Lost or Heroes already on your hard drive and ready to rip to disc-or convert for your iPod or PSP. Setting up Auto Transfer helps automate the process of bringing content over to your Mac. Setting up the TiVo Transfer application is a lead-pipe cinch: you enter your TiVo DVR’s Media Access Key, and the application displays the TiVo’s contents. Vector graphics use lines, points, and polygons to represent an image.Raster images should be used for complex scenes with lots of irregular shapes and details.Vector images are zoom and resolution-independent.Vector images are ideal for images that consist of geometric shapes.Use web fonts instead of encoding text in images.Automate, automate, automate: invest into automated tools and infrastructure that will ensure that all of your image assets are always optimized.Pay close to attention to large images in particular, as they account for largest overhead when resized! Serve scaled images: resize images on the server and ensure that the “display” size is as close as possible to the “natural” size of the image.Use appropriate tools to strip this data. Remove unnecessary image metadata: many raster images contain unnecessary metadata about the asset: geo information, camera information, and so on.Experiment with optimal quality settings for raster formats: don’t be afraid to dial down the “quality” settings, the results are often very good and byte savings are significant.Pick best raster image format: determine your functional requirements and select the one that suits each particular asset.Minify and compress SVG assets: XML markup produced by most drawing applications often contains unnecessary metadata which can be removed ensure that your servers are configured to apply GZIP compression for SVG assets.Prefer vector formats: vector images are resolution and scale independent, which makes them a perfect fit for the multi-device and high-resolution world.In practice, GZIP performs best on text-based content, often achieving compression rates of as high as 70-90% for larger files.Īll modern browsers support and automatically negotiate GZIP compression for all HTTP requests.Ī quick and simple way to see GZIP in action is to open Chrome DevTools and inspect the “Size / Content” column in the Network panel: “Size” indicates the transfer size of the asset, and “Content” the uncompressed size of the asset. GZIP is a generic compressor that can be applied to any stream of bytes. The same library, but minified (removed comments, etc.) is about 3x smaller: ~100KB. We can keep the original page as our “development version” and then apply the steps above whenever we are ready to release the page on our website.Ĭase in point, the uncompressed development version of the JQuery library is now approaching ~300KB. Strip out all the whitespaces (tabs and spaces).Remove inefficient ways of defining CSS rules.Minification: preprocessing & context-specific optimizations Eliminating unnecessary data always yields the best results. Optimizing encoding and transfer size of text-based assetsĬompression is the process of encoding information using fewer bits. Determine if the resources are providing sufficient valueįor best results you should periodically inventory and revisit these questions for each and every asset on your pages.Measure the performance of each asset: its value and its technical performance.Inventory all own and third party assets on your pages.The fastest and best optimized resource is a resource not sent. Apply GZIP to compress the minified output.Apply content-specific optimizations first: CSS, JS, and HTML minifiers.Analysing Critical Rendering Path Performance.Optimizing encoding and transfer size of text-based assets.Google Developer - Critical Rendering Path.Udacity - Website Performance Optimization.Minimize the critical path length, like preload scanner.Minimize the number of critical bytes, like optimizing content efficiency, minify, compress and HTTP cache control.Minimize the number of critical resources, like optimizing CSS (inline, or specify media query), and optimizing JavaScript (defer execution). So I spent some time digging and learning, the things finally got clear.įor short, what’s the basic idea of web performance optimization? But all the knowledge are scattered, and the real mechanism, like the HTML rendering, seems like a mysterious process to me. Website Performance OptimizationĪfter several years working, I’ve learned many lessons like how to write HTML, how to minify and compress CSS and JavaScript files, where to put the CSS and JavaScript reference, how to do the cache control and etc. |