CE/AA lessons in video format.

It may not be ongoing, but the lessons are still there and valuable to noobs - It seems worthwhile to leave this as a sticky as long as there may be folks to need a little kick start on the basics.

RadioKenny,

I was wondering where you were.... Now I understand why I haven't heard from you on my demo and that's fine.  

zemlin Posted:
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It seems worthwhile to leave this as a sticky as long as there may be folks to need a little kick start on the basics.

Agreed!  It also gives us a thread to point the Noobs to when they inquire.

 

Sorry, but I don't agree.

According to me there are no folks who need a little kick start on the basics of Cool Edit Pro.

The basics of Cool Edit Pro are called "Cool Edit 2000," and the most elementary basics of Cool Edit 2000 were already called "Sound Recorder" in the early 1990s, so people who still need whole instruction videos to learn how to adjust the recording volume mixer and how to open a file simply shouldn't be using Cool Edit Pro.

I wouldn't stop anybody from trying to use Cool Edit Pro or Adobe Audition without any prior knowledge of digital audio editing on the PC, but I wouldn't make whole video tutorials for that category of wannabe Cool Edit Pro users either.

The point is that I just don't believe that people who don't even know how to open a file yet are capable of finding the web site, downloading and installing the necessary TSCC codec, and watching those AVI files that can't even be streamed from the web page.

That is why I simply say that there are no folks who need a little kick start on the basics of Cool Edit Pro, because even if such people exist, they probably won't find their way to those video tutorials anyway.

It's an interesting project, but I think that it would be more interesting for the people on this forum if the tutorials for Cool Edit Pro (and Adobe Audition) would start at a "Pro" level, instead of covering basic Windows skills like opening a file. But then again, I'm not so sure if serious Cool Edit Pro users really need whole instruction videos for things that could just as easily be explained in a few lines of written text with one or two images, so I would use that "video tutorial" concept for a funny "digital audio for dummies" tutorial.

Frankly I think that the main purpose of such "video tutorials" should not really be to teach anybody anything, but just to entertain a few people with some impresive images. Looking at instruction videos and following lectures is boring, so I would just try to make a funny demonstration or some kind of television commercial to show people all the wonderful things that are possible with Cool Edit Pro and Adobe Audition.

I would probably use some sound effects in that video too, because what I missed in those eight video tutorials were audio samples of the things that were being demonstrated, and I thought that that made the tutorials a little bit dry and theoretical.

For instance, it's nice to use the sound track for remarks like "notice now how the selected part of the waveform now has a zig-zag shape to the amplitude" — say what? — but it's a video of 800 x 600 pixels, so most people will see that zig-zag shape anyway. Instead of telling people to notice that shape, I would just play that selected piece of audio to demonstrate how that "zig-zag shape to the amplitude" sounds...

I could go further with this evaluation, but I just noticed that the video clips seem to have been removed from the site, so I don't know if that is still relevant...

The video lesson haven't been linked to the new server. I plan to link and leave the old lessons and add more. I think that they are helpful to very new people. I have more lessons finished but dont' plan to add them all until all 10 new lessons are finished. I know that the project has been put on hold and I seem to be in and out of the forums at times. I have a family member in my house that is currently getting a daily chemo treatments for cancer and it has cut my time in the forums. I'm sorry if i seem to be ignoring people at times. I promise to finish helping you AudioVAULT_Guy    Look for me on MSN messanger monday. Sorry that I left people in the dark but, I didn't feel the need to post my personal problems in the forums. I want to also thank all of the staff for taking up my slack over the last 4 months.  

Also....Thanks to all of the members of AM. You are what make us great!!

Thanks, radiokenny


P.S. I can't get rid of the lessons.... It's why I'm world famous!!!!  

Kenny, you obviously have other things on your mind right now than those video tutorials, but if you intend to keep the first eight lessons and to add even more, I would advise you to compress the audio tracks first.

The total file size of the first eight lessons is 44 MB now, but less than 7.5 MB of that amount is used by the video, so the remaining 36.5 MB is used by all that uncompressed PCM audio. Just converting the audio to 32 kbps MP3 would already reduce the file size from 44 MB to 11 MB. That would save at least 32 MB of disk space on the web server, and, more importantly, reduce the download time with more that 75%.

VirtualDub is a good (and free) video utility for this kind of conversion work. You might also want to use it to recompress the video with a codec that most Windows users already have, instead using that TSCC codec that can basically only be used to decompress Camtasia Studio videos. (The codec can't be used to compress video unless you also install and register the Camtasia Studio software, which costs $299.)

However, instead of recompressing the audio and the video, it might be better to convert those AVI files to some streaming video format right away, because AVI files are not very suitable for streaming from a web site.

When I tried to play the tutorials by just clicking on the links on the web page, the Windows Media Player only played the first 30 to 45 seconds of each clip, so I couldn't play them without first downloading them. This could be just a problem on my old PC, but the little remark "BTW, I didn't watch the whole thing. I couldn't" that somebody posted exactly a year ago could be an indication that more people already had this problem from the very beginning. Using some streaming video format would solve several problems at the same time.

René

Since Audition is a PC-only product, what would be the loss in converting the videos into Windows Media 9 clips?  The encoder is free and the range of encode options pretty nice.

And yes, I love VirtualDub.  One of the best free tools known to humanity.

Just a note to everyone. The video lessons are avaliable again at audiomasters.org.

Thanks, Kenny!  We appreciate your efforts.

To quote something I didn't see till today..

The total file size of the first eight lessons is 44 MB now, but less than 7.5 MB of that amount is used by the video, so the remaining 36.5 MB is used by all that uncompressed PCM audio. Just converting the audio to 32 kbps MP3 would already reduce the file size from 44 MB to 11 MB. That would save at least 32 MB of disk space on the web server, and, more importantly, reduce the download time with more that 75%.

Wow, I didn't realise the files were using PCM, there is definately an appreciable saving that could be made.  I would suggest going for some reasonably good quality audio, there's no need to go as low as 32kbs, as that wouldn't sound too great.

About using the TSCC codec, it is nice for what Kenny is doing as it appears to be lossless (although at a low fps and bit-depth) which is ideal for screen capture, I think divx or wmv would do a pretty poor job of encoding the AA videos with their artefacting..

The new Adobe Audition 1.5 videos are released for download at http://www.audiomasters.org

The videos have a new narration and music bumper to end each video. Much better quality than my first attempt in video editing.  

I uploaded the new videos in the windows media video format. The first results were a bit blurry and fairly low quality, but after some tweaking of the settings. The results were pretty good and the downloads a reasonable size.

Most of them are updated lessons to the new 1.5 version.. with the addition of a background noise removal lesson added.

Feedback is welcome.  

I can't seem to locate the tutorials. When I click on http://www.audiomasters.org I end up at http://audiomastersforum.net/amforum/index.php instead and, alas, no link for the tutorials. Any help would be appreciated.

The forum portal page is temporarily (I hope) absent. As a consequence of out recent change of ISP, it hasn't yet been replaced, but when it is, the tutorials will be back.