VIDEO TUTORIALS!

(For a full list, see the wiki's statistics.)

Inline with silver screen traditions, I'd like to thank all the Residents and Resis-to-be of Second Life who came and saw, and hopefully learned something… and were entertained in the process!

I first started the Video Tutorials page as a sapling on 2007-02-27, intending it to become an easy-to-access compilation of Second Life knowledge, as told through multimedia. This page grew to become, as we know it today, a frequently-used resource, viewed 150,000+ times, linked to and cited many times over.

One of my fave things is seeing others contribute to this page, adding their vidtuts so more can enjoy them. An eager example is Benja Kepler; one of this recent videos is "Creating a Sculpted Prim : 2. A Hat" using Rokuro, and can be viewed as follows:

The power of video (meaning not just motion pictures but the narration that accompanies it) is especially relevant with a 3D, animated world like Second Life. Just the other day, I found myself doing a video bug repro for the notorious SVC-94, which proved difficult to describe in words. Communicating fluidly is so important when it comes to understanding that person A and B are indeed describing the same problem.

I've long hoped that video bug repros will become more popular in passing time — if you've created some yourself, please leave me a comment, I'd love to hear from you. Remember that you can attach files up to 10 MB to an issue in the Issue Tracker, and this includes movies. With more people doing this, it'll hopefully help us at Linden Lab, and an increasing wealth of Open Source contributors, resolve problems in a more timely manner. And it makes you feel good, more self-confident to put yourself out there and share.

Back to the tutorials part of this, a strong inspiration of mine is the truely inimitable Russell Brown, whose Photoshop tutorials have made me smile to no end. His precedent and contributions to the advancement of digital artistry (you can't get bigger than freakin' Adobe Photoshop!) are well-worth learning from. Check out his site and laugh along.

In the future, if I have time (as I am wont to say), I hope to create a video tutorial on making video tutorials. This, I get asked a lot about. Part of the challenge is because 3rd-party software is needed, and its comfort of use and accessibility are both so particular to the individual. I use FRAPS to capture raw footage, and I favor iMovie and Vegas for my editing. There are certainly a lot of other tools on the market; one of the hardest parts for me was the encoding process, as there are innumerable parameters that can be fine-tuned for the best quality in a relatively compact filesize. However, take some relief in the fact that simplicity comes through free video-sharing websites like YouTube and Google Video, which also deteriorate the quality to such a degree as to necessitate my usage of techniques like zooming into selected elements to emphasize them clearly — it's the modern epitomy of "cheap 'n' cheerful".

I won't get too longwinded here, but that's some context behind my magic. My point being — and I'll reiterate — if you feel like you wanna make video tutorials, go for it! Just make sure to add yourself to the wiki page so you can easily be found!