I’m on a mission to get better at making tutorial videos. I want to get to the point where I can make videos quickly and still have them be of use to watch, and not be too boring.
So any feedback from feel, to look, to content to voice inflection and sound. Just make note of everything that rubs you the wrong way about this video so I can be sure not to do it on the next one. Also, anything that works particularly well I’d like to hear about as well.
Don’t bother trying to be nice about it. I really want to get good at this.
Overall I think it’s quite good. However I’ll nit pick it for the sake of improvement.
The first few lines of the video were delivered a bit weird to me. Like there were some pauses in there that didn’t sound natural. Almost like you were giving a speech, or had edited them together. The delivery is pretty good overall, but sometimes has this slightly-off quality to it, like somewhere between delivering lines and going off the cuff. I think this is something people just get better at with practice though.
I think that it could be shortened in some places. The bit where you play the drums for the first time with the plugin “essentially bypassed” goes on for a while. You even seem to get bored and fiddle with the ratio knob. Then you play it for too long I think when you bring the threshold down.
The font where it says “Manic Compressor” at the top and “Loud Relief Knob Tutorial” at the bottom doesn’t look nice to me. Picking the right fonts is not easy… I’m not an expert at it and don’t have an idea for what you should use instead. But if you didn’t put a lot of thought into it I would search around for some other fonts. There are tons of free ones online. Could even be the layout that I’m not fond of.
By the end, my question is, “why would you ever not have the Loud Relief knob set to max?” To me, the video makes it sound like it’s just a good thing, and it’s not clear why you wouldn’t want to use it. Unless I missed that part.
Again, good job, just nit picking in case any of that is useful to you.
Yeah, I first recorded it live, but went back and overdubbed. I tend to say too much stuff when I’m talking live, so overdubbing helps me shorten it, but ends up being a bunch of sentences glued together. It doesn’t help that my voice sounds quite unenthusiastic, which makes it sound even more mechanical.
Cool. I can never tell how long to play that sort of thing. It’s hard to keep a sense of time when you are hearing it 20 times while editing. I feel like I need to set a strict time limit on clips where I don’t go more than 5 seconds or so unless I really really have to.
Yeah, I was questioning that too. I wanted the video to show a description of what it was, but at the same time, it looks cheap and clunky. The way it’s cut off funny on the right bugs me too. I think the whole look combines to look sort of meh.
Actually, if I’m not using it as parallel compression, I almost always use it. Not always on 100%, but close to it.
Thanks for the feedback. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for.
I found the intro dialogue a little hesitant… when I re-listened to try to be more specific I found it quite cool but in a slightly geeky style that I enjoy, micro hesitations with a casual vibe - which is not necessarily at all a criticism and may in fact be a highly cool thing…
The layout of the video graphics felt initially a little unsettling, watching it full screen with the smaller box in the middle and with not being familiar with the plug in, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. This became more apparent towards the end where you are demonstrating the use of manic relief turned up and down. I’d like to have had some visual cues, like an arrow pointing to the knobs, or even just a spoken ‘up’ and ‘down’. I’m quite dumb with tutorials and like things spelled out for me. I found your mouse distracting as I wasn’t sure if it was my mouse or yours (grin). I wondered about contextualising it by showing the compressor graphics within a daw and then zoomed into earlier on in the video.
Initially I thought the volume seemed quite low until things really kicked in around 1.26 when it really caught my attention and I decided I wanted to buy one…
Yes, you need to have a script.
It was pretty good as it was, compared to most videos out there.
Best if you could get rid of all the weasel words, like “really”…
The intro line of “wanting to give a very quick demonstration…” should be replaced by “here is a demonstration of…”
(I can determine if it is “very quick” myself…)
Any word that ends with a “y” is suspicious…
Visually you should not be on a shot for more than 10 sec. When things are more dynamic (when you are showing some things being changed for example) than you could go longer.
so the opening could be a shot of you, of the music in the DAW, etc. The plugin should be only showing when something in particular is being addressed that would actually make it a more memorable which is important so that i can remember what it was you are doing when i kick open manic next time.
ok, good to know. I was going to make a little box to go around the knob to show what I was talking about, but I got lazy and didn’t do it.I’ll definitely put that in.
My only problem with that is that there’s a lot more overhead to make a video that includes cameras. It’s more work to edit, I have to set up lighting and the camera, I have to shower and wear clothes, etc. I do agree that it’s better though. If I can find a way to do it quickly, I’d do it every time. I’m hoping to find the balance between doing it well and doing it fast.
A script has a couple of downsides. It sounds more mechanical, and it takes more time. My hope is that the more I practice, the better I can get without needing a script.
yeah i hear you but you can still get screen shots of the DAW or even wave forms just change it up a bit. it will add some time but it will push your videos. i watch these guys who are killing it on the youtube and I am noticing that if you are going to take the time to do a video than it is worth taking some extra time to kick it up a notch.
I haven’t read the others’ notes yet, so sorry if I’m repeating some things. First off, good idea! I could see a whole series of Boz tutorials highlighting things about his plugins tat make them unique, or showing cool and unusual things you or others have done with your plugins. On to some notes…
You sounded a little “stiff”, but I imagine that gets better over time.
You could use a standard “intro”. Short and to the point that’s like a tag line for a Boz Tutorial.
+1 for the brevity. Great to keep them nice and short for today’s attention spans. Plus, often I just want to figure something out then get back to mixing. So I seldom sit down and listen to a 30 minute tutorial.
This is just an observation: the drum track got louder when you raised the “Loudness” knob, so I was wondering if I was just hearing the gain or the effect of the knob. (?)
One last thing, (I’m not saying this because your narration was horrible or anything like that because it wasn’t) but an alternate approach you could possibly take is a “silent text only narration” like Andrei Martinez Agras’ tutorials here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWy4vvy_llxXsy49E_ZHT4g
As an example, this one was particularly effective for me because you don’t have to listen to any dialog fighting with the audio, or variations in levels or what have you. https://youtu.be/cnopXhFWxNk
You can really hone in on the audio and what he is demonstrating. I also come back just to listen to the song in the demo - I totally dig it!
I thought it was a good tutorial and understood what you were trying to demo with the plugin.
Personally don’t care if someone stumbles over a word or two or their cadence changes a little throughout the video.
I have seen other plugin demos where they have a small circle around the knob they are tweaking and that helps me follow the mouse movements.
@bozmillar I have a question about this actually. Are you able to record the audio from your voice, and the audio from the computer (i.e. the example audio that’s running through the plugin) at the same time? I ask because I’m planning to start a podcast where I talk about my songs, and want to play bits of audio here and there. It’d be awesome if I didn’t have to go back and edit those in, and could just do it all in one take.
Is that how you went about it? Or did you have to record them separately and then go back and edit them together? I remember I tried to figure out how to do this once a while ago and gave up. It seems like it should be possible though.
The way I have to do it is I open up 2 instances of reaper. The one with the sound playing uses the normal interface, but I set the output to ReaRoute. Then in the second instance of reaper, I set ReaRoute as the audio device. Then I can route my live mic to ReaRoute 3, and the sound from the plugin to ReaRoute 1/2, and record them onto separate tracks in the second instance of reaper.
For video capture, I use Active Presenter. I don’t bother capturing any audio with it, I use it for video only. All the audio I capture is in the DAW. Then I just drag the video capture into reaper to sync it up.
Video editing in Reaper is very rudimentary, but it’s fast for me to work in because the workflow is exactly like editing audio.
I can go into more detail if you want. It took me a while to find a setup that worked for capturing video and audio.
