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.