Rose Guitar School is offering streaming video — that is, video on demand — guitar lessons over the Internet, thanks to Mac technology. It’s one of the first companies to offer guitar lessons in this manner.
The guitar lessons offered were filmed in the spare room of Rose Guitar School owner, Duane Rose. They were filmed with a Canon digital video camera, and then edited on a PowerBook G3 400 using Final Cut Pro. Each lesson contains different viewing angles close-ups and notation that was imported into Final Cut Pro, Rose told MacCentral.
“It wouldn’t have been possible without Final Cut Pro,” he said. “With this program, bitmaps are easily manipulated, and enlarged making it easier to see in the video. I had spent over $1,100 dollars upgrading my Windows machine only to discover that it could not handle video editing without dropping frames. This was when I decided to buy a Mac PowerBook G3 and Final Cut Pro. Since then editing the guitar lessons have been a breeze.”
After editing, the videos are compressed using Media Cleaner by Terran. With this program, the QuickTime movie is compressed into a Real Player Video stream to coincide with what the server streams.
“Video Lessons are going to be the new wave of instruction,” Rose said. “Its only limitation is Internet speed, which is constantly improving.”
The first set of lessons teaches students how to sight read. There are also campfire lessons and, currently, lead guitar lessons are in the works. Students can become members at the Rose Guitar Web site and watch a free beginner lesson and print out the corresponding manuscript.