Good gosh, how we've grown! Following up from a previous post, the once-fledgling cottage of the Second Life wiki's Video Tutorials page has transformed into gently rolling thunder that's currently at 189,745 views and looks like it'll cross the 200,000 mark in a few days.
This is the part where I thank Benja Kepler, MB Chevalier, Destiny Niles, Jesse Linden, Storm Thunders, Yuu Nakamichi, Thinkerer Melville, and Aenea Nori for editing and adding to the page. I also thank everyone who's ever made a video tutorial, all who've visited and found it useful, and look forward to more to come. By all means, if you've got a great resource that should be on there, go ahead and share. The page exists for the collective glory of enlightenment education coupled with fun, because memorable learning is the best!
Also coming up ahead, Eric Linden's working on a series of video tutorials which I'm giving him feedback on. I think it's wonderful he's working on this, in an animated age where it's become more relevant than ever before. Learn more.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
/me smiles
The only problem is with the ever-changing user interface, and the videos getting 'out of step', but change is good.
It's been great fun making my vidtuts!
Thanks Torley!
Benja
hmmm, how about slidtuts?
that's a slide show tutorial – menu text is so much easier to read and it's a doddle to do
Slide Show on How To Find Sunken Objects
@Benja: w00t you! I agree that video tutorials get dated easily; the same is true of most popular computer software, but particularly Second Life because of the rapid updates. I think in some of my vidtuts, I even caution to this effect, which is why I also felt motivated to keep making more, and keep up with the times.
Slidtuts… hey, that's like an intermediary bridge between full video and still pictures. I'm a big fan of http://slide.com but I'm having a hard time trying to figure out where to pause the slideshow. That link you typed is broken but I found how to get there through another page on your site.
Vidtuts are particularly valuable for Second Life because there's a lot in motion (dragging and dropping, animated avatars and other things) that isn't easily communicable with still pictures.
Oops! Sorry about the link. The slidtut on my vidtut blog was distracting, so I set up another blog call slidtuts.wordpress.com , here's the new link:-
How to find sunken objects
To stop the show and see an individual frame, or enlarge it, or copy it, you need to click on the picture which takes you to slide.com. There you find 'Gallery View', with all the slides arranged under the show. You can then click on an individual picture and zoom in.
Of course, vidtuts rool for anything that moves!
Slidtuts are for the details, the inside story if you like.
Making a slidtut is easy: just name the screenshots appropriately and the names become the caption. A slidtut is so easy to update too: if another picture would clarify something better, then just upload it and insert it into the sequence, and the link is unchanged.
I bet you could export a slideshow to quicktime, in order to be able to display it on a prim in-world, using the techniques that Kisa Naumova has documented before.
This would be a good (and bandwidth-efficient) way to develop a learning space in-world, rather than forcing users to go outside to see the vidtuts…
@Benja: And here you are, championing slidtuts further! Thanks for the help.
@Aenea: And QuickTime makes me think of Apple…
and Apple makes me think of iWork, which includes Keynote for presentations. I've been using it more lately (incl. to make slides for Linden meetings) and it has some really elegant features and slick transitions. I haven't tried experimenting with exporting a presentation to QuickTime yet, tho. Altho yes, that's a very good point about bandwidth.