tl;dr: Videos are hard to make, antiquate fast, and are hard to search. Having done teaching, I've had lengthy discussions about tutorial videos, lecture recordings, interactive apps and stuff like that. Here's my personal view:
Don't get me wrong: I *sincerely appreciate* the effort put into producing tutorial videos. And I *admire* the required enthusiasm and discipline. Video makers are heroes! However, I think that the required effort stands in no justifiable relation to the benefit. And I'm sorry to say that. Here's why: Software evolves. And while it's already difficult to keep text based documentation in sync with changes in software, this is exceptionally difficult for videos. In the best case it's only menus moving to other places, in the worst case a concept is modelled completely different in a new software version. Text can be searched. And thus can be found by your favourite search engine. There is no full text seach for videos (and I don't know about a usable search function for audio), so unless the video is heavily annotated with metadata and a transcript (more work!) it will be quite painful to find the section in the lengthy video that covers what you're looking for. Or to find the one among a collection of many short tutorials that you're looking for. Also, you can easily skim through text. I find it hard to do so in video, jumping in steps of, say, 5s, is already pretty fine granularity for a longer video, but still likely to just miss the short information you're looking for. And it's tedious. Good videos need a script, a good speaker, and a clear concept. They need to be concise and to the point. Missing one of these (or any other issue, like a cough or deviation from the topic, missed-out paragraph from the script, break in the storyline, bad audio quality, or a mumbling speaker) cannot be edited easily afterwards. You need to know exactly what you're doing, before recording. Is there a way to produce a video in a collaborative effort? I don't know, but I have collaborated in writing texts, different people adding their ideas and refining the text, improving it further and further. I assume that you're pretty much alone when producing a video (and I bow to those who do). Maybe there are places where a video is just the right media to present an idea (e.g., to show how tie one's shoes), and maybe a textual tutorial about DT (which will, of course, contain images) could even benefit from a video here or there. But in general I'm convinced that videos are not the right thing to teach software. So, I'm happy that the DT team provides a manual, instead of putting time into producing videos. Again, I bow to those making videos, but I'd rather see that time and effort being spent on improving the manaual. It could need a hand here or there. -- http://stefan-klinger.de o/X I prefer receiving plain text messages, not exceeding 32kB. /\/ \ ____________________________________________________________________________ darktable user mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to [email protected]
