Over the weekend, I recorded my first official screencast for my Python 101 Kickstarter. It’s basically beta quality right now, but I want to get your feedback. The first video is based on chapter 2 and covers Python strings. It ended up clocking in at a little over 13 minutes, which surprised me a bit.
Here’s what I’d like to know from you, dear reader:
- What did you like / dislike?
- What was missing?
- Was it too long?
After getting it done, I can see lots of different approaches for improving it. For one thing, I personally thought it was too long. I think it might be better to break this chapter down into 2-4 videos to make them a bit more digestible. This would also allow me to cover some of the sub-topics more in-depth without boring the listener and also have the nice side effect of trimming each video down to a core element.
Anyway, I look forward to what you have to say. Here’s the video:
As a person who watched a few tutorials i think 10 mins is about the sweet spot. if you want to break them up i’d say just put the time in the description. Too many tutorials have too many videos with half the time being taken up explaining what you did in the last one or what you are going to do in the next one.
I’m glad to see that you’re doing these screencasts! I felt like the video’s length was just fine and you covered quite a bit of ground. My biggest complaint would be the audio quality – very loud, lots of clipping, lots of background noise/humming. I know this is just a test/beta video but I figured it was worth mentioning anyway. Will the resolution of the final product be higher as well?
I’d also recommend watching your mouse cursor placement. There were a couple of sections where it was a little difficult to see what you were typing due to the cursor being slightly in the way. Not a HUGE problem but it could be a mild annoyance to the viewer.
I think this is off to a great start and I can’t wait to see where it goes. I’ll be backing your kickstarter shortly!
I won’t be talking about what happened previously or the next video, so that won’t be a problem.
Yeah, this mic had high reviews, but appears to be crap. I’ll have to upgrade my mic and I’ll probably have to figure out how to remove background noises too. I hadn’t noticed the mouse issues, so thanks for pointing that out.
Looks great overall, love the idea. Couple of ideas hit me.
For sound quality: turn off the Vitamix in the background (:)), and invest in a high-quality mic. I know many people really like the Snowball mic.
I’d cut that golf ball texture, which takes up half the screen, stealing precious pixels from the editor/interpreter window, which is all I care about.
I’ve heard that the Snowball and the Yeti are good. I just ordered an Audio Technica Cardioid mic as they are designed to reduce picking up sounds to the sides and behind the mic. We’ll see how well that works.
And yeah, I might just have the recording software only focus on IDLE in the future.
Place the mic so that a minimal level of keyboard action is picked up. I could not continue to watch this tutorial, simply because of the annoying keyboard sound.