Why Some Tutorials Are Annoying
high dynamic range
I have to admit, I share this guys' parody critique so much as a nubile artist. There were SO many tutorials from skilled, seasoned artists that were terrible at teaching.
Kudos to all those teachers who actually make awesome tutorials!
Anyone else share similar experiences, or even see their own tutorials have similar challenges to overcome?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bUtZzi6hag
Kudos to all those teachers who actually make awesome tutorials!
Anyone else share similar experiences, or even see their own tutorials have similar challenges to overcome?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bUtZzi6hag
Replies
I don't hate those kind of slow tutorials, I actually hate the opposite, the ones where the tutor clicks all over the place while tweaking values without really explaining what are they doing, its like "just put those values", I hate those so much!, obviously the comment its towards tutorials that claim to be basic.
That said, some tutorials are so phenomenally bad, I don't even understand how a person feels comfortable admitting they authored it.
A similar pet peeve are youtube interviews of artists. You know when a show has a really good guest artist but the main hosts keep interrupting them before they can finish a good story.
Some of the worst:
yeah.....I have the opposite problem, My tutorials are actually timelapses so people asking me a lot how I did certain parts :S
When I make a video tutorial I try to explain only one tool or concept, keep the duration as low as possible (3 minutes is too long), and show every step in the process. I also keep on display a small tool that shows the mouse and keys states.
I always have to prepare the script in advance, write down the audio script and the video script, and practice it a few times.
Recording audio and video is the fastest part, but I can't do it at the same time... I always have to record the video and then the audio (many many times per line).
And then comes editing..! I speed up the sections with a lot of slow mouse actions (painting, typing) and freeze the screen when I need to explain something in advance.
It takes me almost 1 hour to produce 1 minute of video, but my goal is to transmit to the viewer as much information as I can in as little time as possible. However, I still don't know if this is the best way to do it!
I did an Alchemy tutorial years ago and when I was putting together it together I had a hard time fitting it into a reasonable amount of time because it had 40+ mins of painting demonstration in it and I did not want to make (much less narrate) a 40 minute video. So I broke the video up into sections, the first part was a description of the tools with short demonstrations of how they work and how I use them. Then I had two timelapsed illustrations where I showed them in action in a real picture, where I mostly just rambled incoherently over the video.
Then I put timestamps in the description of the video on youtube for people to skip to where they wanted.
The video ended up being about 15 minutes long and basically all of the instructional information was in the first five minutes, with the remaining 10 being demo. I also had annotations for hotkeys in the first five mins that I forgot while recording the video. I felt like this was as good as a compromise as I could get between making something with a lot of unnecessary information, while still getting to the important shit as fast as possible.
That being said, for free videos, even when people don't bother to do anything at all to organize their content in a presentable manner, I appreciate that someone took the time out of their life to to dumb something down for my stupid ass to understand it. Even if I do get frustrated sitting there half the time scrubbing the timeline trying to get to the right part. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In contrast here's some good ones
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/tutorial.htm
It's just not worth it to sit through 30 mins or 2 hours of watching someone just do one thing, when you can be using those minutes continuing to model or paint something yourself.
Of course, there are still some exceptions but I've noticed lately that text tutorials have served me better to become a faster artist.
Well it's the internet... 99.999999999% of the content is useless or annoying or whatever you want to call it, it's up to ourselves to find the information useful for us.
Tutorial that I think have 0 value might be very useful for someone else.
I can only appreciate all the stuff that is available and the efforts people put into it tutorials.
I'm seeing more and more offered as streaming services (I'm looking at you DT) that don't offer custom speeds which makes impatient me sad.
Obviously, the best tutorials are the ones that comes with both a video and written tutorial.
fuck this guy"
C'mon, Beggars can't be choosers : P
Allegorithmic has awesome free tutorials for Substance, made it so easy to learn. This morning before work I started learning about VEX and VOPs in Houdini from a free tutorial I found on Youtube. On and on, so much quality free stuff.
All of the non-game courses I take at school locally cost at least $500 or more. Last full course I took on backflow valves cost me over $1,000 for course, textbook and certification. Nobody outside of the games industry gives their info and skills away for free, at least not at the professional level.
J: 10 seconds backwards
K: Pause/Play
L: 10 seconds forwards
And there are many many others... like slow down or speed up!
STOP WASTING MY TIME
A month or 2 back I did a short tutorial, and realized I say "you know" way too fucking much.
It takes practice, and seems easy until you actually try to do it yourself.
Though it's not helping much if I playback 2x speed and the guy just umm, yeah, click this, ayy, button here, and then, whoops, click dynamesh here, and then, yada yada.
This was supposed to be the start of a series but it took 8 hours to even get this, I had to dub in a script reading because the original audio was just me cursing at how slow everything was
At one point he spent a full minute explaining the use of the B hotkey to change the brush size. It almost seems intentional.
Come to think of it, I've always preferred text tutorials to videos; even if they do include too much preamble it's easy to skip, unlike with a video. With text you can read at your own pace.