A video tutorial series for beginners

Hi everyone,
I’ve just begun a series of video tutorials on the basics of Ardour - I’ve posted the first one at http://vimeo.com/2867399

So far I have planned four, and they should hopefully be posted every week - time permitting

The episodes will be

  1. Getting Audio Into Ardour
  2. Moving and Routing Audio Around (Editing and Mixing)
  3. Using JACK to route audio from JACK aware apps, and controlling them with the jack/ardour transport control (might show how to use MIDI TIME CODE to control ardour as well)
  4. Exporting a session/range and setting range markers for export to CD/burning to CD

Would appreciate any feedback as I’ve never done anything like this before but I thought it about high time I got my butt into gear and gave something back to the ardour community.

One issue in particular I’d like feedback on is the video quality/format. I chose vimeo for HD purposes, but my screen is 1280x1024 whereas vimeo only supports widescreen 1280x720 (16:9) - or 640x480 (4:3) which I feel is too small o see what’s going on. So you will notice in the tutorial the screen is stretched but still watchable. I can capture a portion of the screen in the native 1280x720 giving a really crisp picture - but when the screen follows the mouse it tends to be a little jerky and I think might cause motion sickness - plus one doesn’t get the whole layout in view.
So there lies my predicament - preferences would be appreciated

Thanks,
Solv

Thanks for all the comments:

I agree about trimming it down - for the next one I will try to be a little more prepared

I’m running the Kwin with compositing so it may be the reason switching windows skips a little…

I’m capturing with recordmydesktop which allows for JACK, also meaning I will be able to route the master outs of ardour directly into the record session in my next tute =) The original quality is nothing short of amazing, its in ogg theora and the 20 min file was 100 MB. It’s so good in fact I was watching it fullscreen and paused to go away, came back and started trying to use my desktop but it wouldn’t respond!! After encoding to h.264 it lost quality and became 350 MB!

Robert: Thanks for the tip, I’ll definitely give it a go. I will also try uploading encoding it to flash as vimeo doesn’t re-encode flash files apparently.

Very nice thank you.

Hi Solv,

Great effort so far!

I think you could trim it down a bit. For example, there’s no reason to point out features and say “ignore that for now” - just ignore it! :slight_smile: I appreciate that you are trying to be thorough, but a newcomer may think it requires 10-12 minutes of setup before you hit “record”.

The audio & video quality is great. There are a few times (when switching to/from the mixer view) that the edit screen does not update. Is that the window manager, or is it a side-effect of the video capture? It’s not a big deal.

What program are you using to capture the video? I like the fact at it captures JACK audio.

It’s a very good start, keep 'em coming!

-Ben Loftis

Hi Solv!!! Great work!!

hey solv, when i go to that page, i am told that i need flashplayer9 for watching this video. i actually was having v9 until some days ago and now i am using flash-v10 for linux…
any hint how to see this video?

cheers,
doc

Hi Everyone,
The second tutorial (part 1), is out now. Part 2 will come very shortly

Thanks to Robert who got me onto using a nested Xsession (I used Xephyr) which sorted out my resolution problems!

Enjoy

Hi Solv,

thanks for the video!
Have you already tried to change you Xserver’s resolution to 1280x720 (“xrandr -s 1280x720”)? This will make kde & ardour run fullscreen at the desired resolution. If it doesn’t work, you could try xnest and start a sub-Xserver: “xnest -geometry 1280x720”.

-Robert Schwede

When you transcode (from theora to h.264) you always lose quality somewhat, but increasing the size four times and ending up with worse quality seems to indicate that you did something wrong in the transcoding.

Not really sorry, I only have flash player 9 and it plays fine, but I would have assumed flash 10 was backwards compatible. I encoded it into h.264 which is a common format that flash can handle…so I’m not really sure to be honest sorry =(

Keep up the good job, thanks!

Okay Tutorial 2 Part 2 is now online

I hope to have tutorial 3 up in the next couple of weeks, although I’m in the middle of buying a house, moving and my wifes due in 5 weeks so it’s all a bit hectic…but hey, there’s always time for the important things in life!

these videos are good.
and they show up very well, i can see everything.

thanks a billion :slight_smile:

Absolutely wonderful work. Thank you

When is Tutorial 3 coming?

Some progress here? Would be nice :slight_smile:

This is great stuff! Any chance on some info on doing monitoring and headphone mix in the future?

Your tutorials are great! I look forward to the next one (if you decide to keep going, that is - it seems to have been a while)

Those videos are a great way to learn Ardour and they seems to be popular :slight_smile:

Would be nice if solv could make some more or tell is when the next will be out…

But that doesn’t have to mean that solv should be the one for the next video… Maybe some other experienced guy can jump in and make the next episode?

Thanks a lot Solv,
very useful tutorials.
:slight_smile:

Just started using ardour and these tutorials helped speed things up significantly. Thanks so much for these.