Poll about preferred tutorial type

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

I was thinking about creating tutorials working on a daily basis with Blender for over 2 years now and was wondering what type of tutorials the community prefers.

  • Video tutorials
  • Video + text tutorials
  • Video + text + image tutorial
  • Image + text tutorials
  • Text only tutorials

On one hand I find video tutorials nice, on the other hand you can´t take it granted everyone got flatrate broadband, and if you work along with a video, you can´t really print it out or work step by step because pause&play all the time is really annoying.

Video & Text might be nice, then you can watch the video, get an impression and then do the step by step written explaination, where it might be nicer to have images.

You don´t need a video at all and you are satisfied with images with nice text as .html or .pdf to print, maybe optimized for black and white print?

Or puristic, minimalistic tutorials in text only, where you got to find your way through the UI? It has advantages too, if you show exactly where everything is, people tend not to memorize it and to get lost if they have to navigate somewhere themselves.

2

I voted Video + text with images, but…

a video is usally enought
text with images is enough
(for me)

both would be perfect. But this doubles the amount of work for the author. Finally you are in danger to present the same thing twice and maybe different.

As you already wrote, there are benefits and downfalls on each type. I want to add some more:
Videos are difficult to kept uptodate. Especially with small changes. They consume a lot of space. But they can show what the author did. You can stop them, rewind etc…

I’m a “visual” person and l do not like to read a lot of pure dry text. Small text tuts are fine, but same pictures to show at least the result are better.

Just my mind.

3

Image + Text tutorials. They are easier to follow. I find with video tutorials I have to keep rewinding and re-watching things to get them down, which can get annoying.

4

interesting question! i enjoy videos when its learning for my own enjoyment (and thats not to downplay them at all, casual viewing for inspiration and to see other people’s workflows contribute immensely to my overall learning).

but at the same time, i know there’ll be times at work when i’m stuck trying to figure out a problem, and i don’t want to spend time scrubbing through a 1/2 hr video trying to find the one spot where i remembered seeing them do the particular task i’m trying to do. its those times that i’m happy to come across a written+diagram explanation of a task, were i can do a quick text search to find the relevant information i was looking for.

i’d say video is best if you’re doing practical work - ie demonstrating a collection of techniques in service of an actual final product (like many of the blendercookie or blenderguru tutorials, for example). but if you’re providing an explanation for a general task, like “settings for using instanced objects as particles” then maybe a step-by-step text tutorial would be a more useful reference. although in those cases, i’d actually suggest you consider helping out on official documentation!

anyway, best of luck in whatever you decide to do, and i’m sure many will be appreciative now matter how you choose to share your expertise!

5

I prefer Video because it is easy to see things in action. I just don’t like it when I get a grand tour of everything on every video. Get to the point. Don’t try to teach new people how to use the interface. Or teach about modeling in a hair tutorial. Just do the tutorial at hand. If you want to do tutorials about the interface, fine. Do that as a separate tutorial and don’t try to make the “All in one” tutorial. It is not needed I don’t think. And it is a waste of time. Also I don’t need to sit there for an hour and watch you create something. Just show what you need to show to get the point across. I don’t need to watch you fumble around with the creative process. That is a waste of time. Unless you are doing a tutorial specifically to show that. And finally come up to the brand new world of video editing tutorial people. If the image is going to take a while to render or if something goes wrong, hit the pause button. I don’t really want to watch you fumble around wait for things to render etc. Look over the video when you are done and edit out the parts that drag. Get to the point. Did I say get to the point?

6

Text with images all the way.

I hate video tutorials with the fury of a thousand suns. If you support video tutorials I hate you with the fury of a thousand and one suns. Do you really want me to hate you that much? Why do you make me hate you?

Seriously though video sucks because of:

  • reduced portability
  • bandwidth issues
  • having to sit through ages of crap to see something interesting
  • pausing and rewinding
  • watching someone spin their model around in 3D while they figure out what to do next
  • everyone’s horribly annoying voice. You’re not Morgan Freeman or David Attenborough so shut the hell up
  • the complete lack of planning evident in so many videos
  • your horribly annoying voice
  • lack of search ability
  • your horribly annoying voice
  • the painful minutes of vanity video at the start where people waffle on about themselves. I don’t care. You’re not interesting.
  • everyone’s voice seems to annoy me a bit too
  • WRAA! :spin:
7

IDD! =)
I found out usually it is asked what people want tutorials about, not what type so I thought it´s time.
However, 40+ views, 5 votes… poor participation, I blame it on the latest forum performance issues.

Regarding videos, what really, really bugs me is that only a few use panning capture software resulting in you seeing the full image, compressed to shit and all you see is a blurry blob of grey.
What bugs me too is people that don´t talk, like “Now we shape this thing” and then you see 5 min of a rotating sphere and the same vertex being pushed back and forth.
And the worst of all is my fav. sentence, which i´ve seen in plenty of tuts already “Now we click XYZ… strange, that doesn´t work. Well I don´t really know what it does, anyways”

And I see a tendency of regressing quality in video tutorials. It seems people watch a tutorial, say to themselves, I can do that, well not better, but i am ways cooler and then they start off by doing a tutorial about the stuff they just learned from a tutorial, lacking basic knowledge of the interface, datastructure and blender itself, ending in clicking back and forth in menus, not knowing keyboard shortcuts and partly having a workflow thats ridiculously cumbersome. I regularily loose some of my hair watching tuts.

Don´t get me wrong, I am far from perfect but I think there are a lot of very bad tutorials out there teaching crap although they get the desired result somehow.

For the rest I am pretty much with Fade he pretty much nailed my perception, although there are a few tutors I really enjoy. I´ll for one would be none of them I guess with my Schwarzenegger-pronounciation. =)

8

Th way I plan to do tutorials is more of a scripted thing. If I ever do any. Though I will actually be doing one soon here for a magazine come to think of it. But my plan is to simply script it, plan out the screen shots/animation that backs up the instructions and edit i all together in my NLE. What a concept, huh?

What I love to hate about some of these tutorials is the 1 minute looking at the blender cube while the guy explains what the tutorial is about.

9

Text + Images if it’s short and step by step.

Video if you’re funny or if it’s more in depth on approach to things :slight_smile:

10

Like Monster, I too am a “visual person” - actually, I think that label applies to pretty much everyone: The points made by Richard Culver and Fade are valid, but they only apply to bad video tutorials, not to video tutorials in general.

Written tutorials can be just as bad, if not worse, depending on who writes them. The reason we see more bad video tutorials than good video tutorials is simply because video tutorials are easier to produce, and because most people on the net are narcissistic pricks who have no instructional skills, but love the sound of their own voice.

However, if we were to take a good video tutorial, and compare that to a good written tutorial, I think most of us would recognize the inherent superiority of the video tutorial.

You can see exactly what is being done, so there is no need for the author to bother explaining every small detail, the whole thing just flows as a stream of obvious steps, which you can easily repeat.

In other words, you don’t have to transcribe the words into a “mental movie” of what you actually need to do, because you can see it on screen, and this allows you to focus your mental resources on why you’re doing what you’re doing, and how it all fits in the scope of the big picture.

The author is free to focus on the pure core of the subject at hand.

Concerns about bandwidth and management are largely technical, and therefore temporary: bandwidth will catch up with requirements, and editing software will advance to the point where “video tutorial modification” can be done in some acceptable time-frame, with minimal effort.

11

Bandwidth? Was trying to watch a shredder video on YT and it had halted every 2 seconds for loading and that was only a 3 minute video. And on top as i came back - meanwhile doing offline tasks - i had to start over that loading hell.