Church Video Tutorials

[jcalhoun777]

I stated creating tutorials for After Effects, Final Cut, Color and some other software, with a focus on church video people, especially volunteers. I'd love to get your feedback on them, and hear your ideas on how to improve them. You can find them at http://vimeo.com/groups/churchvideomixpot

Thanks so much!

[tedanderson]

To be brutally honest with you, I sat there for the first 4 minutes of "Making Your Video look Swell" saying to myself, "Come on! Get to the point! What is that you want to show me!?" because you were all over the place in your presentation.

Had it been anyone other than you, I probably would have said to myself, "He's not talking about anything" and then I would have gone over to another site. Overall, it didn't seem like you really got to the meat of the lesson until you were 8 minutes in. The information on color correction is good and useful, but it gets to be frustrating when I am trying to focus on what's important while listening to all of these sidebar "dry humor" comments. Constructively I would suggest getting directly to the point of what you want your audience to know. It's ok to crack a joke or two during your presentation but if you want to keep the attention of your audience, you have to have something useful to share within the first 15 to 30 seconds or else your audience will lose interest.

The other thing that you will want to consider is the link that you post. Any time you forward a link to describe what you are talking about, you will want that link to go directly to what you are describing or asking about. In your instance, you posted a link that went to your main vimeo page and not to your training videos. This is a common mistake that causes your audience to stray away because the average attention span on the net is very short.

Have you ever called a major corporation only get stuck on one of those automated voice systems that say, "Press 1 for this and 2 for that"? And sometimes the maze of number pressing is so deep that you get frustrated and want to talk to a live operator to get your question answered. That's kind of how people feel when they see you post a message that says, "Click here to see my training videos" and then they end up seeing your home page that tells them everything about you and your friends..thus having to navigate through the site in order to find your training videos.

[KeckCreative]

First off... thanks for doing free tutorials. It is a wonderful act of service to share knowledge for the joy of sharing knowledge.

One the specifics. I learned a great deal about After Effects from Andrew Kramer and Aharon Rabinowitz tutorials. Both periodically go off topic (Andrew in particular) when doing their tutorials. But sometimes their ramblings while often funny, still drive me crazy sometimes because I want them to get to the point. However, the skill/demo pay off for sticking it out is often huge and over time sort of a humanization that comes out of it, where it can feel like a friend helping you out that just a straight instructional video. But it's a tough line to find.

Here's some other 0.02 worth of comments:
I recommend starting off showing the end result to give the viewer an idea of what the tutorial is going to teach me to do. Avoid unnecessary mouse movements or scrubbing through video.

Again, thanks for offering up talents to help others. That can't be said enough.

[jcalhoun777]

Thanks so much, great feedback. I'll definitely begin using it in future tutorials.