Episode 139

You’ll Never Ruin a Tutorial Video Again with these Expert Tips!

How do you ruin a tutorial video? More importantly, how do you fix it? We’ve got you covered by providing strategies to fix common tutorial pet peeves in this episode of The Visual Lounge!

We have an awesome panel of experts, including Andrew DeBell, Senior Learning Experience Strategist at Atlassian, Cara North, Founder & Chief Learning Consultant at The Learning Camel, and our Instructional Designer Lead at TechSmith, Chandra Owen.  

Andrew, Cara, and Chandra join forces to break down their top pet peeves for instructional videos and their best tips for avoiding them while improving the effectiveness of your visual content. We cover the best use cases for video, why pre-work is an essential step, common visual/audio mistakes, and why feedback is key.  

Learning points from the episode include: 

  • 0:00 – 3:27 Intro 
  • 3:27 – 7:43 The best use cases for video  
  • 7:43 – 11:00 Tips for improving images or videos  
  • 11:0011:51 Mid roll 
  • 11:5114:42 Pet peeves that ruin an otherwise good video 
  • 14:4220:48 Small things that can hold a video back 
  • 20:4825:22 The importance of audio
  • 25:2229:55 Should you use music in tutorial videos? 
  • 29:5533:27 Should you use picture-in-picture in your videos? 
  • 33:2738:28 The common mistakes Andrew, Cara, and Chandra are still working on 
  • 38:2843:19 Speed round  
  • 43:1945:19 Final takes on how to avoid ruining a good video 
  • 45:1946:16 Outro

Important links and mentions: 

About the Podcast

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The Visual Lounge
Discussions about the power of visuals and videos and how to make them even better.

About your host

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Matthew Pierce

Matthew Pierce, Learning & Video Ambassador from TechSmith Corporation, has created videos for learning and marketing for over a decade. He is the lead behind TechSmith Academy, a free platform teaching video and image creation for business, which has been used by tens of thousands of users. He is the host of The Visual Lounge Podcast from TechSmith, which streams live on Youtube and LinkedIn weekly. Matthew is a regular speaker at multiple learning and development-focused conferences and is a regular contributor to various training publications. Connect with him on LinkedIn.