As I look at the poll results for tutorial length preference, here is what I see:

Total Votes: 64

• 0 votes: 2-10 minutes (0%)
• 4 votes: 10-20 minutes (6%)
• 9 votes: 20-40 minutes (14%)
• 24 votes: Around an hour (38%)
• 4 votes: No preference (6%)
• 23 votes: Depends on subject (36%)

Just about the same number of voters chose “Depends on subject” as voted “Around an hour.” During the last several days these two dominating choices have remained neck and neck, often having the same number of votes at the same time.

I should acknowledge that many of the voters have watched Blender Basics 1 and 2, which possibly represents a built-in bias, since both of those tutorials are about an hour in length. Since the response to those tutorials has been overwhelmingly positive, many voters might conclude that an hour per tutorial is ideal, at least for Blender Underground.

I’m going to argue in part with the results, and I welcome your comments and disagreements. This poll really says two things to me:

1. Voters in part conclude that there is no ideal length for a video tutorial, but rather it depends on the subject covered.
2. Voters want as many hours of video tutorials as they can get.

It’s possible my interpretation is flawed, and that the voters who ticked “About an hour” really want primarily hour long tutorials; but I am going out on a limb and claiming something different.

An hour of video tutorial is 45 minutes more instruction than one of 15 minutes, and thus potentially more valuable in terms of quantity of instruction. But is an hour-long tutorial really more valuable than four 15 minute tutorials? Not in my estimation.

I have to give more credence to “depends on the subject.” There are many niche subjects for Blender and other applications that would be much better when covered in 10, 20, or 30 minutes than in an hour. To serve as an example: if I chose to make Transform Manipulators (from Part 1) its own tutorial, I think most would find an hour long treatment excessive.

To be fair to those who voted for “about an hour,” I can recognize high value in having a host of related subjects well organized into a single presentation. It’s convenient and low maintenance, especially if you’re having to track down separate elements from different sites, posts, or pages. It’s potentially more manageable, especially for new users.

Ultimately I think video tutorials can be valuable and desirable whether short or long, and most of us will take them any way we can get them. After the Blender Basics series, along with branching out to beginner tutorials for GIMP and Inkscape (and probably others), I hope to offer more focused Blender tutorials on everything from nodes to compositing, rendering, sequencing, and animation. Whether these end up being short or long will depend on the depth of the subject at hand. If I limit videos to hour-length tutorials, I may end up producing less content overall.

Since we are living in an Audio/Visual internet age, I can see much value in tackling certain niche subjects with quick and focused videos, which can be released as podcasts transmitted from the Blender Underground. I’m not sure what the first Blender “quick vid” will be, since I’m still deciding how to wrap up Blender Basics, but I think that the ideas will present themselves as the battlefield develops, and as opposition to The Man continues.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 2:45 am and is filed under Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.