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Re: Effective use of video in software tutorials?

Subject: Re: Effective use of video in software tutorials?
From: Keith Purtell <keithpurtell -at- keithpurtell -dot- com>
To: Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>, "techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2012 01:04:36 -0500

Each and every reply I've gotten had ideas I'll putting to good use. And, as always, Peter has skewered those who who do this kind of thing badly with scathing wit. Having suffered through several awful YouTube tutorials, I found his re-creation screamingly hilarious.

Keith

On 3/30/2012 10:13 PM, Peter Neilson wrote:

Start by studying existing software tutorial videos you can find on
YouTube. Examine the really bad ones, and then anti-emulate them. There
is a tendency of the producer to believe that showing stuff on video
makes it transparently obvious.

The video narrator knows where he is going to move the cursor, but the
viewer does not. Thus a script like this one is especially annoying:

As you can see [NO, I CAN'T. WHERE?] we've got the frobnatz here. So we
just move over here [WHERE?] and right-click to bring up the, oops, we
didn't get it. There. It's docked to the left side. I hope it's not off
your video. [WHAT IS IT? YOU NEVER SAID A NAME. WHY DO WE NEED IT?] So
we just enter the number from before [I DIDN'T SEE THAT. WHAT NUMBER?
WHERE?] and click over here [LIKE, WHERE?] and we're done. Next we'll
show how to use it in the gazoing-ploot.


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