Ratios and Rework
It’s been six months and a bit since we started working on Version 4 of this course, so I’d like to share two things we’ve learned about creating online tutorial videos:
- It takes a long time.
- A lot of that time feels like it should be unnecessary.
Let’s start with “a long time”. It takes me 3-5 hours to prepare a good slide deck for an hour-long lecture that I’m going to deliver in person. A slide deck for a screencast takes 8-10, because I need to prepare more slides: since there isn’t a lecturer making eye contact and pointing at things to keep viewers engaged, a slide deck for online use has to have many more small transitions.
Writing a script to go with those slides is another 3-5 hours, much of which is spent rearranging the slides as I discover things that don’t work as well as I thought. I don’t know if it’s fair to count this as an extra cost, or whether it’s just bringing time I would spend on the second run of a course forward to the first run, but it’s still time.
Recording audio takes about 1.5 times as long as the audio (if I stumble, I just pause, take a breath, and restart that sentence), so call it 1.5 hours. Editing takes longer than recording, so let’s say 4-5 hours all in (again, including some rework as I notice glitches that escaped me before). Getting everything off my machine and onto software-carpentry.org is another hour by the time all is said and done, so an hour-long lecture made up of 5-6 episodes comes in between 20 and 25 hours.
But now we come to #2: the stuff that feels like it should be unnecessary. If I want to make a change after an episode has been posted—even a small one—it’s substantially more work than changing a few slides in a PowerPoint deck would be. First, I need to record new audio, or get whoever originally created the episode to find a microphone and record some snippets of MP3 for me (having the voice change for a slide or two in the middle of a screencast is very jarring). Second, I need to re-export the PowerPoint slides as PNGs, and if the number of slides has changed, rename some of them: Camtasia refers to imported image files by name, and if I simply re-export and re-import, I have to go back and change the time boundaries for all the images after the ones that have been updated.
How bad is this? Well, I just fixed a small mistake in the episode on Python lists. It took almost an hour, start to finish, and the change in audio quality where the fix was made is painful.
And then there’s version control. PowerPoint is effectively a binary format: yes, there’s XML in there, but version control treats that XML as lines of text, which means its diffs and merges are senseless. I’ve used HTML and LaTeX in the past—at least I can structure them so that line-oriented diff/merge is sensible—but both formats force a strong separation between text and image, where PowerPoint allows me to mix them freely as I would on a whiteboard. I don’t like PowerPoint, but the final result is easier on the eyes than what I can do with today’s HTML or LaTeX with equivalent effort.
What do I want instead? I want something that:
- Plays nicely with version control (i.e., diff and merge just work).
- Allows me to mix text and images freely (PNGs ghettoed in text isn’t good enough).
- Has stable open source authoring tools with a long likely life in front of them (so that investing in them won’t be insanely risky).
- Includes a decent text-to-speech engine (something better than Xtranormal‘s, please) so that when I update what I’m displaying and the script of what I’m saying, I can just push a “compile” button and get a seamless video out the end.
What’s that? “And a pony for Christmas?” Yeah, that too. But let me share a secret with you: whoever builds this thing first will be rich, famous, and popular, because this—content creation and maintenance that the average instructor can afford—is the real bottleneck in online education.
For what it’s worth — a lot of the slide transitions you do (unveiling bullet points, etc) are trivial with the beamer or prosper LaTeX packages, and there’s very attractive templates for both of those these days. I’m not sure in what sense the graphics is more integrated in a powerpoint slide than a latex set of points with a picture beside it.
But this doesn’t really answer your larger issue of wanting a whole-thing solution, and Ideally (I think?) you’d like to be able to mix in screencasts too, right? Tricky.
Yeah, Beamer and its kin will do incremental reveal, but if I want to put in some curved arrows from a callout to a piece of program text, or a picture of nested lists, I have to drop out of one tool, draw in another, worry about fonts and sizing, live with separation of text from image: it’s like I can have 21st Century content creation with 19th Century appearance, or vice versa. *sigh*
So Ideally you want that Avatar software that has you read random sentences for a couple of hours, then knows how you talk, so it can translate text to YOUR voice. Wouldn’t that be freaky!
Have you considered using Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/) to generate the slides? It is a well-maintained open source desktop publishing tool. For a number of years I’ve used it to create posters for poster sessions that I’ve been to, but its only recently that I’ve been using it to create my slide decks for talks. I find it much better than powerpoint for either application because it has layers, much better layout tools, and by default it creates links to images as opposed to embedding them directly in the file. In this way, if you have a script that generates a graph from data files, you can make tweaks to the script and the newly updated graph will automatically change in your Scribus document without having to reimport it every time. Its pretty easy to export to PDF, so that’s how I’ve been making my new slide decks. You can also export all of the pages as PNGs or JPGs.
Here’s how Scribus might address your issues:
1. The file format is plaintext XML. You might run into the same issues as with ppt though.
2. Check
3. Check
4. Good luck with that
Let us know how it works out.
@Joshua Smith
Yes, we looked at Scribus; it does have some nice features, but its XML doesn’t play nicely with version control (or version control doesn’t play nicely with it), and doesn’t address the re-work issue when we’re doing voiceovers. I also ran into some weird behaviors with its drawing tools on Mac OS X (Feb-Mar this year, may have been fixed since). Upshot: slightly better than PowerPoint (so *much* better than OpenOffice), but not enough to outweight PPT’s ubiquity.
Hey Greg, not sure if this is going to sound outrageous, but what if you were to crowdsource some of the CREATION of the course out to your audience. After all, there are many who would love to contribute to an open source courseware community, and yet don’t have the know-how to create their own course. You, on the other hand, have the know-how, but are simply bogged down on the more trivial organizational items that perhaps others might be eager to handle.
So how about you divide the labour? There’s an open source video platform out there called Kaltura that allows individuals to remix audio, video, images and titles right in the browser. The finalized remixed product can be drilled down into it’s component parts, adjusted and edited, and re-saved or forked. It’s got a ways to go, but imagine a scenario where you could post your raw audio/video onto a Kaltura CDN along with images of all your slides, and leave it to eager viewers to help assemble the lecture for others. Should you have a change to make, just re-record the segment, and post it to the CDN.
Yeah, it might feel like you’re pawning work off on the students, but there are plenty of people who would see this as a fair trade
Any thoughts on this approach?
Just an added note, but the Kaltura system also allow you to pull in media from other CDN’s like flickr, youtube, etc from within the media browser component of the player/remixer. So in theory, a viewer watching the lecture, realizing that a particular concept seems a bit obtuse or lacks visual flair, could pause, search out a diagram or illustrative image from flickr (searching only Creative commons-licensed work, of course), and insert it into the lecture.
FYI, Kaltura is working with the Open Video Alliance, with a mandate of making video as wiki-fied on the web as projects like Wikipedia have made text
@Patrick Connolly If I had more stuff for people to edit, it would be worth exploring. If I could persuade people to contribute cycles (I’ve been trying to since 2004, with meager results), getting them to write examples, slides, and scripts is a higher priority…