The App

Over the next few days I will be distributing the 'app' for use in a number of local secondary schools. Evaluations from both staff and students will also be appearing over the forthcoming weeks.

Below are a series of screen shots from the 'app' itself:

Guitar & Bass icons to choose the category of lesson

Choose a lesson from the drop down menu (top right)

Guitar lesson: page shows video, lesson description, chapter selection, & PDF

Guitar lesson 2: page shows video, lesson description, chapter selection, & PDF

Bass lesson: page shows video, lesson description, chapter selection, & PDF

Guitar lesson: video & PDF split screen

Bass guitar lesson video only

Guitar lesson video only

IP - Intellectual Property - A Contentious Issue

If increasingly more educational content is going to be delivered online (or remotely from a centralised source), which to me seems a logical extrapolation of the pressures of financial expediency and technological innovation, several issues will need to be discussed and solutions agreed.

One such issue is the hardware infrastructure necessary to deliver the content, which I intend to discuss at a later date.

Another and more contentious issue is who will own the (copyright) rights inherent in such delivery and of equal significance, what and how will they be paid for their rights of ownership?

My starting point for such discussion is an example of the 3rd party public usage of commercial CD's in the music industry and the manner in which rights are allocated and accrue payment.

Essentially there are two copyrights inherent in the public use (performance) of a CD. (What I am discussing here is not personal ownership but the non-domestic use of a CD, ie in connection with a business). If we take an example of such usage with which we are all familiar: the 'performance' of CD's on radio shows (Radio 1 & 2 etc). Every time a commercial, (copyrighted) CD is broadcast, two separate and distinct fees (royalties) are payable: one in respect of the physical copyright, the CD itself which is generally owned by the Record Company and the second, in respect of the Intellectual Property (IP), ie the song, which is generally owned by the songwriter (but that is not always the case).

The two fees are based on the amount of usage in time (hours, minutes & seconds) and also the size of the audience ie Radio 2 pays a higher usage fee than Radio 1 which in turn pays a higher usage fee than regional radio.

Fees (royalties) are collected by specific agencies: PRS (for songwriters) & PPL (for record companies and the musicians involved in the recording) with distribution on a number of set distribution dates throughout the year.

I think this is a good model to take as a starting point, primarily because it ensures that the content creators, the teachers and lecturers who prepare, deliver and source the educational content, maintain their ownership rights and are similarly reimbursed for the usage of their materials based on the extent of that usage. And equally, the educational institutions that supported the development of the materials will also benefit via a kind of mechanical copyright. 


Such a system could usher in a new form of funding for non HE educational establishments, who could easily benefit from the development of online materials featuring their own staff. And those staff too, who excel in delivery and the development of content, could be earning significant royalties. 

Any comments?

Working with Cameras

We are very fortunate in having three Sony Z series cameras to work with, 2x Z5's & 1x Z1. We film everything in full HD (1080i) which provides the level of quality that we aspire to but at a cost that we think is very good value for money... I will talk in more detail about the cameras soon.

There have been two problems that have been a consistent issue for us: 

The first was lighting, which we have hopefully solved with the addition to our set up of three 800 watt halogen lamps on tripods with diffusers. As long as we allow ourselves the time to set up the shot (always static so that helps!) with an appropriate lighting array, our three lights work very well.

The second problem is focus. It is all too easy to use auto focus but the inherent danger with that is that the camera will not always be focusing on the object that you want or expect it to. For example, whenever we have been filming drums or any scenario involving microphone stands, invariably the autofocus will align itself to some obscure part of the drum kit or the microphone stand rather than the performer behind it.

The answer is simple, use manual focus but then one is reliant on the viewfinder in the camera... or an external monitor and it is the latter that is by far the better solution. But then we run into a new problem... cost!

External monitors are expensive, potentially very expensive but we have recently purchased a pair of Iiyama monitors, which are HD, have a good colour response and accept an HDMI input. (The Z5's have an HDMI output)... and yes it works. Pictures below:

Subject and monitor shot

Monitor shot

Subject and monitor shot 2

Subject and monitor shot 3

Everything!

(Thank you to Alice who kindly volunteered to sit to demonstrate for us)

Logo's

Identity and specifically brand identity is such an important factor in the success of any product. 

When we first came up with, initially the concept and then the name iTutorus, as a team we were all quite confident that the two elements, concept and name, were complementary.

The original logo soon followed but now on the advice of some graphics specialists we have decided to go for something new:

This will be our new company logo, followed by themed variations to reflect the learning area:

Guitar

Bass

& Drums

Hope you like them

Spreadsheets & the Sony MRC1K

Workflow! Such an important word and for this project maintaining the workflow: scripting, recording audio, editing audio, pre production, filming, editing, creating PDF's, putting it all together is a significant undertaking and anything that can help or support the workflow will be gratefully received. 

There have been two recent additions to our working methodology which have significantly advanced our workflow... the first is the use of a spreadsheet (pictured below) which we use to log every piece of filming that we undertake:

This might seem like a very small step but with so much footage being generated a detailed spreadsheet is an absolute essential.

Our second piece of workflow good news was the arrival of the Sony MRC1K.

This is a compact flash recorder which currently holds a 32Gb flash card. For us in real terms this means 143 minutes of HD recording.

Up until now we have been using DV tapes... lots of them(!) in fact we have several boxes full of DV tapes all of which have to be labelled and most importantly, captured in real time. In other words if you have a 60 minute tape with 60 minutes of footage it will take you 60 minutes to capture the data to your computer hard drive. Currently we have 16 of such DV tapes waiting to be logged and captured... a minimum of 16 hours...

however,

with our all new MRC1K we are no longer tied to capturing in real time... using the log and transfer function in Final Cut Pro we can transfer (capture) the footage in a fraction of the time! 

An Auspicious Day!

Today it was my birthday! 

And today we delivered the first iTutorus lesson loaded iPad to Churchill School. 

Ten guitar lessons, ten bass guitar lessons and three drum lessons... the ball is rolling!

Alison Cooper (Head of Music) Churchill Community School

Alison & Marcus Dyer (Music Technician) Churchill Community School

Alison & Marcus & Sarah Clark (Head of Faculty Creative Arts) Weston College

Alison will be providing feedback and evaluation sheets describing her students' use of our teaching materials. 

The collated results of these will be appearing on these pages over the forthcoming weeks.

Interview with session musician Gary Alesbrook

We are currently working on developing lessons in teaching how to play a variety of musical genres and we will be starting with 'Funk'.

As well as the regular team we are also working with a couple of colleagues who are highly active and successful as session musicians so we thought it would be interesting to conduct a couple of interviews to help illuminate this arcane area of musical employment and opportunity.

But before we leap into the first video which features top trumpet and flugelhorn player Gary Alesbrook, a small amount of technical detail: 

The following interview was filmed against a blue screen and then we used chroma key to extract the background to create a plain black backdrop... lighting is essential to the process and we used three 800 watt halogen lights with white (umbrella) diffusers. The final process was to colour correct all of the footage which took three hours to render!! But I think it was worth it... hope you enjoy the video.

Gary with blue screen

Gary with chroma keyed background

I should also add that the microphone is a very nice Peluso U47 type mic which we used to record Trumpet, flugel and sax but I will talk about that in detail another time.

The interview:

Interview with Gary Alesbrook - session musician

New intros to guitar & bass guitar lessons

These are the all new intros to our bass and guitar lessons. There are some nice images of the tutors' instruments here as well as some fine editing... enjoy: 

Guitar intro:

iTutorus guitar intro

Bass guitar intro:

iTutorus bass guitar intro

Storage- Backing Up your Files

Possibly not the most exciting of topics but certainly a subject area that should be taken most seriously.

'Back up your work - regularly' is an instruction that many applications share with us and it is clearly good advice. 

On the Macs that we at iTutorus habitually use, as a part of the operating system there is a file (and possibly professional life) saving device called Time Machine. This extremely user friendly piece of software automatically backs up your work and not only can you retrieve lost data should your main drive cease working, you can also revert to earlier versions of your projects.

Over the last few months, despite our best efforts to protect and preserve our files, we have suffered the loss of three hard drives, all from the same manufacturer. In each case, the problems started with an ominous clicking sound and then error messages that the data could not be retrieved or the drive couldn't be read and would we like to initialise the drive!

Each of these drives was 2Tb in size and catastrophic is the only word I can think of to describe such data loss. But there's no point in dwelling on the past and in the hope of learning from our mistakes we felt the only realistic option for the future was to invest in more expensive purpose designed storage. The Glyph!

The Glyph drives in the picture below are now our principal storage units. They are 1Tb models but they come with data recovery guarantees should the unthinkable happen, again! 

There were guarantees on the hard drives that failed as well but it's important to read the small print and essentially the guarantees were extremely limited. 

Pictured also is a 1Tb Seagate drive which is highly portable, has a firewire 800 option and is ideal for moving small files around. 

Video Encoder Choice

The role of the encoder in the workflow is to compress the video files to a workable (smaller) size, compression is the means by which we reduce the amount of storage space taken up by each video file.

To put the problem of file size in perspective, at the capture (filming) stage of a project, our video files take up about 13GB / hour (around the same size as the usable space on our iPads) - and this is already slightly compressed footage. Once properly encoded, each video file will be reduced significantly to between 15-100MB, depending on quality (1GB = 1024MB). This allows us to fit significantly more (compressed) video files onto the iPad.

Compression does have its drawbacks, most notably reduced quality - however by using clever tricks (the right codecs), it is possible to dramatically reduce file sizes but still keep the quality high. Compression choices will always revolve around a trade off between file size and picture quality.

There are many different compression standards available, applicable to both audio and video file formats, the current leader in video compression is called h.264. This is the standard used for most video delivery on the internet, and is also used for modern Blu Ray optical discs. The iPad also supports h.264 natively.

The term 'natively' is one of the key reasons behind making the iPad so good at playing h.264 videos. 

Where many budget computers struggle, the iPad is helped by a built in chip dedicated to decoding the h.264 standard. Most computers have to use highly processor intensive software to decode h.264, but the iPad’s chip is specially designed to handle the operations. It is important to note, however, that the iPad does not support ALL variations of h.264. Like many technologies, the 'standard' is constantly being developed and there are a variety of ‘flavors’ of h.264.

There are many different applications which allow us to convert video to the h.264 standard, including:

• Handbrake - free open source software

• All Apple Video packages (including Final Cut Pro)

• Commercial applications like ‘Main Concept’

Apple’s packages provide a very quick and easy way of delivering iPad compatible h.264, however the quality and output files sizes are not always the optimum. 

Handbrake is a free and viable alternative and provides a highly configurable environment to change the many parameters of the encoding process, however it still doesn’t provide a definitive end product. It should also be noted that there are potential usage implications as there are many owners of the different technologies featured in the x.264 standard for which some developers might incur royalty payments.

By far the better option, from a quality perspective, out of these three options, would be to use a commercial application, however, these can cost anything up to £1000 for very high quality and well supported software, which represents a serious investment for what may ultimately result in only marginally better picture quality.

Content Delivery - The iPad

One of the principal aims of iTutorus is to enable students to access teaching and learning materials utilising innovative technologies, media and new ideas. 

Making the content easily accessible and within an exciting format was and is very important to how this project has been conceived. 

Following our extensive research and citing: ease of use, portability and interactiveness, in this post we will focus on delivering content through the iPad.

There are many benefits that the iPad has over standard video and interactive delivery methods. 

Unlike a desktop PC, due to their portability, the student can interact with the content in any location they wish - in work rooms, in a classroom or at home. They are better at performing general usage tasks and are far superior in playing HD video than cheap laptops and are generally much better value than mid range units. 

The iPad also provides a more tactile and responsive user interface than full featured computers.

Having settled on the device, its also important to consider how the content is accessed. There are three ways of delivering video content on the iPad.

• Using the standard ‘Movies’ App

This involves loading videos through iTunes. The user is presented with a simple list of videos available to play. 

• Hosting the videos on a website, using the Safari browser to access the content

A webapp would need to be created to host the video in an attractive and accessible way. This would provide much more functionality than simply using the Movies app, however, the downside would be speed of access - having to wait for web pages to download.

• Building an application from scratch

Apple provides a free SDK (Software Development Kit) to build apps for the iPad. These can include all types of media, including video. 

In order to install apps, the developer is required to sign up for a software developer program, but these provide a range of ways to install applications on the device. The major benefit of this option is it allow for very customised and responsive interaction with the device.

It is this latter option that we feel to be the most significant. We have developed our own application for the device. It allows students to select a lesson, then interact with the video and a PDF file that accompanies the lesson.

On the right of the screen, in horizontal view, there is a list of available lessons.

Top left is a video of the lesson.

Bottom left is a PDF version of that lesson.

Equipment Part 2... Microphones

Having talked about the importance of the signal path in the previous post, our next topic is to discuss the front end of the signal path, the microphones.

We use a number of different microphones depending on the job in hand but there are certain microphones that we use all of the time from the point of view of sonic performance as well as practicality.

If we are recording a voice over, (out of shot) the first call microphone will always be the (Electrovoice) RE20. This is a dynamic microphone, it is durable and totally reliable and running it through the Neve preamp, into the Fat Track and then optically into Pro Tools is the method that we always use. Oh and it sounds great!


Electrovoice RE20

We always put up a pop shield in front of the mic to absorb the plosives. It's a first class microphone and perfect for the VO role.

When we're recording a VO (voice over) to camera, we use a 'shotgun' mic. This type of microphone features a highly focused sensitivity. In the picture below you will notice the ridges along the sides. These result in wave cancellation which eliminates significantly the 'off-axis' sound. Perfect for in-obtrusive, invisible recording. 


Sennheiser 'Shotgun' Mic

Setting up microphones to record drums can involve a single microphone or 10 (or more) mic's, depending on how elaborate you want to make the recording.

The word 'practicality' was mentioned earlier and this is often a defining factor. If you are going to set up 10 microphones to record with, you also have to think about mixing 10 sound sources as well as the inherent issues of 'phase', which I will talk about in detail another time.

Our 'practical' solution is to use a simple but highly effective set up, which accurately captures the sound and sonic space of the drum kit.

The pictures below show a basic three microphone drum recording set up: two spaced overheads (left & right) and a kick drum mic.

The first picture features the two overheads: AKG414's, which are a matched pair (factory paired for similarity of response). The AKG414 is an industry standard which provides a highly accurate and detailed sound.


AKG414's

The second picture features a second option, two Sennheiser 614's, small diaphragm condenser microphones which also provide a high quality sound but at a much lower price.


Sennheiser 614's

Below, for the kick drum mic we have a number of options:

Electrovoice RE20

Shure Beta 52 Mic

Sennheiser 605