Comment by Ma8ee
11 years ago
> The one advantage of video tutorials is that they keep the viewer's attention more easily
Not mine. The information per unit of time is so low so my mind start to drift or I start doing something else and forget about the video. Much prefer text that I can skim and find the parts that are relevant to what I need to do and simply skip the sections that seems to be most fluff.
Agreed. I actually run all my 'speech' (e.g. presentation, tutorial etc) videos at 1.5x or 2x. Cutting a 30 minute video down to 15 is really, really awesome. Particularly when the guy speaks slowly, when he already speaks fast I'll do 1.25x or 1.5x.
I do this on youtube and things like treehouse. The reason I tend to watch youtube on my tablet in the browser and not the app is because the app doesn't allow this and my brain goes numb.
That having been said, I really love video for some things. For example, I'd much rather listen to Greenwald's speech at Brown on civil liberties than read the equivalent article. I tend to clean my room or play Pro Evolution Soccer while doing so and somehow that works brilliantly. I can't quite keep the same concentration when I read for 30 minutes.
But it really depends. If I want to look up some code documentation, that format is a billion times better in text than video. If I'm somewhat familiar with the topic, know what I'm looking for, the ability to easily skip over introductions, side topics and history and just Ctrl+F for e.g. a piece of code, it can save an order of magnitude of time. I tend to like videos for things I'm wholly unfamiliar with and want to listen to from start to finish, which frankly is pretty limited.
Playback at 1.5x or 2x makes an even bigger difference for audio books. A 20 hour audio book suddenly becomes "just" 10 hours, yet it is still understandable.
Video seems to be popular with younger people. I believe this was discussed on HN a while ago. It might also explain the enormous abundance of frighteningly long videos going over the most simple things. My 8 year old daughter regularly makes 20-60+ minute videos about play sessions (dolls, LEGO, Play-Doh - not that LEGO isn't fantastic, but there's a limit...). YouTube seems filled with similar stuff. I've seen 10+ minute videos that are really just about how to type tracert in a Windows command prompt. Someone apparently watches this stuff.
There's also the people that like having videos running while doing something else. I find this to be a disturbing habit, especially when it's done advertisement laden TV nonsense. But people seem to enjoy it.
I find video to be extremely useful for learning something new. For example, when learning math, I find Khan Academy's video lecture to be much more useful than reading the exact same thing out of a textbook.
After I've learned it? Text all the way.
I guess having something running in the background saturates your mind better? I certainly do it, switching from silence to music to lets plays to episodes of QI to MOOC lectures depending on how mentally engaging whatever i'm actually doing is at the moment. Otherwise my mind wanders off the topic at hand and i end up browsing hackernews for far too long.
Sitting at a computer means that there's about 10 possible distractions for me at a given moment, and if I want to do a consistent stretch of actual work, i just happen to need some background noise.
The only thing is the familiarity. If you've heard the song or watched the video a few times, it no longer interrupts focus and actually helps improve it.
An other example are music videos where they show you how to play a certain thing on an instrument. It takes 30 minutes for something that would take two sheets of music notation.
I really think many such videos are a step backward as far as carrying information goes.
I don't even start the video. They are almost always just marketing and hyperbole anyway. I assume that if they went through all the troubles of creating a video they must also have the information in much-easier-to-produce text form. This has come back to bite me only a few times when somebody points out information in an introduction video that is not covered in the "Introduction" page of the manual, but I consider the win of not having to sit through boring hour-long sales pitches much greater than the abysmal information loss.
Video can be by-product of internal training, I often suggest we record such meetings for people that were sick/fture workers. It's better than nothing.
If only someone did ctrl+F for video.