Video tutorials in the Manual
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Description

The page is up for review: Video Tutorials

After a quick discussion with Boudjewin and Scott, we thought it would be good to have a page that aggregates video tutorials in an appealing fashion, so that the users have a one-stop place to find all the resources they need to learn the program.
This would complement the documentation nicely for those who don’t like to read, and would rather watch tutorials.
This is a task to discuss where this page should go, and how it should be organized.
Considering there aren’t too many videos available, a dedicated page in the documentation might work at first, although having columns and a bit of flexibility to organize categories would be useful as well. For reference, on Ctrlpaint, there’s this page, with a simple layout that does the job (200 videos): http://www.ctrlpaint.com/library/

Which videos?

At first, I suggest that we just collect videos from the most active persons around the project, like first-class sources - I believe Wolthera made a few educational videos, David as well, and my videos. Are there some free ones made by Timothée? Outside of people who are active around here, there is this young artist, Sara, who has a popular channel, and at least a handful of videos with useful tips. But more importantly, she makes very appealing paintings, so her content can help to impress new users. Just like David, but with a different style.
I don’t know of any other great video resources for Krita. There are a few more lone tutorials out there, but nothing outstanding. There’s also JSHint who made a lot of videos, but it’s mostly live recordings and the quality varies a lot. I’ll let this all up to discussion, because I’m very critical and sometimes skeptical about the educational material you can find online (including mine).

Categories

There are a few ways we can approach this. I would go with a few categories targeted at specific art jobs: animators, illustrators/concept artists, texture/3d artists, … With extra categories like quick start, and core features for tutorials that are relevant to everyone. That way we can organize the content in a way that answers the users’ problems, and that might resonate with them. It makes it harder to choose where to put videos exactly though, so it’s up for discussion. Especially if anyone was to add their own contents in the future, this might become a mess.
Another way to organize everything would be to just use the areas of the program. Like everything related to brushes, colors, layers (layers docker, masks, nondestructive layers…), Selections and transforms… And would still need some categories that are related to various art forms, for the videos that don’t cover a specific feature but are still useful for the users.

gdquest created this task.Jan 2 2017, 10:06 AM

AgeOfAsperagus is the guy who made the Bob Ross+ Krita tutorial, and he made that as a teacher trying to do a tutorial series for his highschool students, and I think it shows in the relaxng quality. I would definitely add it.

We could organize these a bit better on the docs page. Currently all tutorials (written and video) are stuck here

https://docs.krita.org/External_Training_and_Tutorials

We need to make that page nicer looking and give a bit more direction. I think the landing page needs to show more content and have a better organization like @gdquest points out.

I agree the age of asparagus video could stay. That is still getting quite a bit of views, so a lot of people must think it is helpful for starting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZpA_VTbHTU

gdquest added a comment.EditedJan 2 2017, 4:14 PM

Also, the first page users stumble upon when they click on "Tutorials" in the manual is this one, which is automatically generated and hard to navigate: https://docs.krita.org/Category:Tutorials (by the way, the divs aren't aligned horizontally, it's not using the styles provided by bootstrap - would be an opportunity to change that)
How about replacing it altogether with one page with the text-based tutorials at the top, so the visitor would still see the official content first, and the videos under it? Would be simpler, easy enough to maintain.
A quick structure example:

Considering how much blank space there is on the existing pages, I'd like to give a 3 columns layout a try on desktop, but it'd need a fallback to 2 columns on tablets and 1 on mobiles, which doesn't seem possible with the current styles. Is it possible to add classes to support columns on small and large devices? It shouldn't add much weight to the css and would allow me to make the main docs page responsive.

Please tell me if that's ok to you. With your green light, I'll go ahead and create a new page with all of the links and categories, so we have something to work on afterwards. Or if you'd rather discuss the categories we should use beforehand, we can do that too.

Responsiveness is a neat idea, but that might be a bit out of scope for this task. The docs site currently isn't designed for phones, so it will be a bit hackish if we only have one area that works with it. The website is fluid and works ok on tablets, but on a phone it needs a pretty different experience. We would need more discussion on how people would use the docs site if they were viewing it on a mobile device. Obviously the entire navigation system would not work on the left as it is now, so that would need a bit of thought. We have two navigation systems on the docs site. I think it would be better if that were a separate task.

With the tutorials page, I think doing 3 columns is fine. I agree the currently landing page for tutorials is a bit messy to look at. I am ok with you going in there and making improvements. Let us know what you come up with. I trust your judgement.

Makes total sense, and you're the one who can access the stats, I didn't even ask whether or not people do check the page from mobiles - after all, Krita is a desktop program.
I'll just create a new page in the docs and submit it here for review as soon as it's ready. Probably gonna take me a few days before I can get to it, so i'll let you all know.

The page is up! It's very simple in the end. What do you think of the content? Do you think I should add some banner images? As there are none in the docs, I preferred to wait for your feedback. So in the end, I'll just try and curate tutorials on Youtube directly.

https://docs.krita.org/Video_Tutorials

May I subscribe to channels that post Krita related content on the Youtube channel (even if they do so occasionally) ? It'd be easier to keep track of everyone that way.

Looks nice. The playlist I'd a good idea. I will think about it a bit and see if there are any improvements.

gdquest updated the task description. (Show Details)Jul 17 2017, 11:22 AM

Is this page ready and live?
I noticed that all the playlist links give 500 internal server error on youtube

@kamathraghavendra : The page is ready if there's no extra request. But it's not linked from anywhere in the docs, as I'm waiting for some feedback first, at least.
Regarding the server error, wait for a bit and try again. As the error says, it's linked to youtube's servers.