Why I hate video tutorials
Oso3D
Posts: 15,085
in The Commons
People love video tutorials and in some cases they are so helpful.
But here I am, on step 2 of a complicated process, and I have no fricken clue what I'm supposed to do at this point. Video tutorial? Um. What minute marker is this on?
ugh
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Feeling your pain. I am very grateful to the people who make tutorials of any kind, but I wish there were more text/pic tutorials and handbooks.
I have trouble seeing the details in video tutorials. It is tough for me to narrow in on the problem things I want to view, because so much time is spent on other things. Fast forwarding to the useful bits is a challenge.
I was looking at a tutorial for Genx2, but did not find it helpful, because the V4 conversion for example did not have the same problems I was running into with converting M4.
Some video tutorials do drift toward the "watch me work on this" style, which can be frustrating. Without calling out any specific tut, what are you trying to do? Maybe someone can help you get you past step 2...
Well, now I'm hitting a 100% crash rate on a step with no clue why. sigh
( http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/145721/geograft-transfer-utility-crash#latest )
Actually ideally they'd should write a wriiten and illustrated document and test & edit it and then when that is correct make a video tutorial of the ducument and go back and create links in the written document to the correct time marker in the video.
I really love PDF tutorials as I can print these out and process the material at my leisure and skip the parts that I don't want to read.
I find that too many video tutorials are poorly done. Either the host gets side-tracked from the main topic and makes a tangent, which I follow in case I miss something. Or, it takes them 30 minutes to explain something that could be explained in 5 minutes. In addition I typically need to scrub the video back and forth to get the gist of the technique/process that I want to learn. I end up writing things down; essentially making my own PDF of the video tutorial.
Regarding geographing, have you ever looked at the PDF tutorial by Blondie9999 "Advanced Rigging in DS4 Pro"? I have purchased all of Blondie9999's tutorials and have found them well-written, concise and very helpful.
I agree. But it's almost impossible to remain neutral and simply teach something.
Almost every tutorial creator has to start injecting themsleves. I think they should make 2 separate videos. One about themselves and another that's pure TUTORIAL.
And yeah, I hate these for all the above reasons mentioned.
And there's one (with comments turned off for a reason) that I'd link to if I wasn't so lazy to go searching for it that is clearly called something like
- CREATING Depth of Field in Daz and he, I kid you not, Renders the scene twice,. Then mentions that you can put them in photoshop, blur one, layer it and erase parts to create a depth of field effect.
I eventually found a forum link where they use the actual CAMERA in DAZ, but I was so mad that I watched that idiot's "tutorial" video and he had the nerve to not show any Photoshop work.
Agreed! But don't hold your breath.
The most consistently useful tutorials around, it seems to me, are the free ones from @Sickleyield. A lot of them are done in both text and video.
I have probably a tear's worth of video tutorials if I were to watch them all. Both purchased and free. And invariably I start into a tutorial and loose the thread. I'm in the process (v-e-r-y slowly) of snapping screen shots and building a library of notes and shots. To Will's point - it's not just 'what minute is the content in' but what video covers this one detail I've got a problem with.
Video tutorials can be helpful, but they're absolute crap as reference material until someone a heckuva lot better than I am comes up with a search utility that can search for text in both the audio stream and the image stream.
It also makes me very angry at the idea of having to buy tutorials for 'how does this button work' level stuff.
I shouldn't have to go forage for private individuals coming up with instructions on how the program works.
I read fast. With the typical written tutorial, it takes me approximately one second to determine whether a given page is relevant to what I'm trying to do. With video tutorials, I have to watch through minutes on end and hope for the best.
To see what a video tutorial SHOULD be, go watch the ZBrush tutorials on the Pixologic site. He explains the tool he's going to use, shows the options it has and what they're for, uses that tool in a project, and tells you every step as he does it, and why he's doing it.
It's just an excuse to wing it really. Good writing is much, much harder than flying by the seat of your pants in a video and saying you've created documentation. If the folk in these video comprehensively covered the topics they were talking about, I have a feeling they'd be thrilled to write PDFs as documentation in advance to making video clips. Otherwise the videos would be such a muddle of incomplete and mixed up over the shoulder thing it's take forever to actually document all the functionality. I'm not talking about 3rd parties here, but as Will said, the owner of the SW should be doing what the fellow that make the DAZ Studio Rigging PDF has done and make it even better to boot as part of the product. I want a PDFs I can send to have bound as a cheap book. Wonder want it cost to have the Rigging PDF bound and printed at Amazon?
...I've already "written volumes" on this as many may know.
Between short term memory issues, old tired eyes, a bit of attention disorder (partly due to the memory lapses), and tinnitus, video tutorials are pretty useless for me. Add to that the fact there are a some that are simply poorly produced (as noted by in comments above). I've watched some that make those old 16mm films I remember from grade school seem "riveting" (crikey, maybe I can use them as a sleep aid).
Really don't have much more to say that I haven't mentioned in other threads already save for the fact that I believe text/PDF tutorials go a lot further to foster a real learning process than mimicking what someone does in a video.
I'm unfortunately going through a phase where I'm trying to learn to do a bunch of stuff that's very new to me (morphs, creating models, rigging, geografts).
And it's a flippin nightmare, since almost none of it is even vaguely documented, and when I hit issues I basically have to count on the kindness of other posters and a lot of experimentation because there's no indication of what is going wrong or why.
Between that, the state of the world, and a bunch of other things, I'm just a clamped down teakettle of rage nowadays.
For Carrara users if you don't mind paying there are some good ones put out by PhilW here at DAZ.
He also has some under the Name Infinite Skills.
http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-8-5-tutorial-video-11-5-hours-long-instant-digital-download
This one covers the basics of Carrara
http://www.daz3d.com/advanced-carrara-techniques
This one covers more advanced stuff including Modeling and testures in detail.
http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-realism-rendering-training-video
For those who like realism in thier pictures he demonstrates how to put the carrara render engin to its paces.
And the newly released animation for carrara.
http://www.daz3d.com/animation-in-carrara-video-tutorials
Lots of poeple on the Carrara Forum really enjoy his videos. they are broken down into shor digestable logical groupings.
I have watch them numerous times to try to lets it all sink in but he covers so much it is nice to have the menu system from Infinate Skills.
Since you said you were using Hexagon in another post somewhere here is a link to a bunch of hexagon tutorials posted in that cow thread in the newbies section:
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheEZhexagon/featured
More a lament in regards to model making...
Often even in some of the best videos, you are really just looking for one key detail... "How do I export"... "Where is the Submenu"... "How do I extrude selected polys"....
With an book or written tutorial you can skim to "at the menu bar at the top, click on Options, then in the sub menu, scroll down to export and select it and in the dialogue box that opens choose your format... for example: Wavefront OBJ"... Solved. Elapsed time: 28 seconds... including opening book and finding page.
If it's a video you have to sit through several minutes watching until they get to that point and then hope they move the cursor slow enough to see what they clicked on... If you miss it or the resolution is bad, or they are using an older or newer version which does not look the same... You keep going back and forth until you figure it out or get sick and ask on a forum.
Or you are confronted by some menu option that you can't figure out, like "Bilaterate Odd Faces" (I just made that up)... The program has no handbook, no real documentation or even basic glossary of what any options mean, so you have to sit through scores of videos hoping someone will touch on it... Which they won't... Then you'll go and ask somewhere and inevitably someone will kindly explain, "it's the same as the old Bilaterate Average Faces"... Which means nothing to you since you just bought the program, so you just say thanks and try to figure out a way of asking that question again that doesn't sound like you are either an idiot or didn't appreciate the previous answer... But while are thinking someone will suggest next time try clicking on different options to see what they do before asking, because they love figuring stuff out, somyou should too, which would be great if pressing buttons only gave results, but more often than not, you need a combination to get a result, so clicking "Split Face" won't work unless you have a certain tool active and something selected... So literally you can sit there for decades trying combinations till you get a result.
I appreciate the videos, the help and the joy of discovery, but the burden of information really lies with the company that made the software to have some real documentation and not to have other people do their work for free at the expense of a smooth learning process.
Well, you are not alone... I've gone from "generally disgruntled" to "perpetually angry" in a few short months.
So, chickenman, from 'I hate video tutorials because (reasons)' and 'I particularly hate having to pay for stuff to explain the basics of what I may have paid money for,' you gleaned 'what Will really needs is links to incredibly expensive, hours long video tutorials'?
LOL, no, chickenman wants to make sure you don't like chicken.
...I had one like that, about forty minutes long and I had to sit through about half of it until it finally got to the actual topic at hand. The creator was using a custom UI setup (I pretty much stick to a base default one) and never included any decent close ups of the screen or parameter settings he used. The audio sounded muffled almost making me nod off (it also didn't help that he had a strong accent, either Dutch or German). I ended up closing the tab and just went back to trial and error again until I got what I was trying to do, work.
I'm a very vivid tutorial writer (not specifically within the field of 3d rendering though) and yeah, sometimes I can't help wonder if it has become a lost art. Video tutorials can be nice, but they make horrible reference guides I think. Also because in most cases it's not really so much a tutorial (in my opinion) but merely a showcase. Showing the audience how you handle a certain problem, yet it doesn't always explain all the details which surround it.
I've come across too many video tutorials where it became obvious that the author simply knew which options to click in order to get things done, yet was totally clueless why he needed to click those options. Yet that last part is always something which I try to cover in my (written) tutorials.
Example, I just did simple dynamic cloth simulation in Unity doing tutorial and it didn't work and going through the tutorial did not find solution. Found instead a short Q&A tutorial and on the 3rd time through it worked (Unity was crashing because I was doing something the tutorial and apparently Unity itself was not expecting but any rational person would do have done the prior 3 steps - ie it tells you to create a sphere, an empty game object, a cloth object but then all of the sudden you DON'T create a plane for the cloth but select plane for the cloth even though you have not created one?).
Worth repeating, again and again....
ShelLuser: Blessings upon you! And yeah, I think tutorial writing is a lost art.
I hate video tutorials too
I have a bunch of excellent Mark Bremmer ones on Carrara I have never watched that I got on 3Dworld magazine with Carrara 7 and never bought PhilW's as fantastic as they most likely are for exactly the same reasons.
I do love a good PDF though!!!
wolf359: The problem is not everyone works with information the same way. If you are claiming that everyone benefits from a proper video tutorial, you are essentially telling a bunch of people that their experiences and analysis is wrong.
Please don't do that.