How to Make a Laracasts Type Video Tutorial

I think Jeffrey uses vimeo to host the videos. As far as video quality, well that's going to be in the recording equipment.

How do you make a video as stremlined, polished and effective as laracasts does? What does Jeffrey do to make this possible?

Jeffrey has many years of experience producing training material, and is -- obviously -- naturally a gifted teacher.

You're likely to find more technical information on producing video training on Youtube though, than to expect much on the subject from here. No reason Jeffrey would want to tell someone how to replicate his process, that'd be (kind of) like him promoting his competition. Wouldn't hold my breath for that. ;)

@jlrdw Thank you.

@willvincent Thank you for your reply.

But in this sense, we shouldn't have this website at all. Everything in this website is promoting Jeffrey's competition. Does this point of view always apply? I doubt it does.

Not all of us are gifted for making Laravel tutorials, but some of us might actually benefit a lot by knowing how he structures his videos and how he does his rehearsals and preparation. Imagine you want to teach middle school students some bit of coding but you want the videos to be somewhat high quality. That's my point.

So redirecting back to the topic, how does @JeffreyWay achieve this level of fluency and coherence?

All replies are appreciated, so please feel free to comment!

You are asking a redundant question, @willvincent has already explained through experience. Practice doing one.

start simple and build your confidence.

The tools are simple, but it depends on your platform. For the Mac, the #1 tool is screenflow

post to youtube

@jlrdw Thank you. I don't think the same way as you do. So no redundancy really. I am just looking for the answer to the same question. And yes, I've practiced doing a few myself.

@Snapey Thank you for your reply. I am more into the methodology that @JeffreyWay follows.

For instance,

Is he first building the entire example for himself, explaining it to himself, then speeding up the process, then recording it?

Or is he building bits and pieces of the example and recording them sequentially?

Or is he building everything from scratch with a few rehearsals and recording it, then deleting the sound and re-recording his sound on top of the video?

As you can see, these has nothing to do with the tools. It has a lot to do with his procedures or methods, if I may say so.

Thanks again and still waiting for more comments on this curious topic.

Short of getting lessons directly from Jeffrey or using a spy cam (wouldn't suggest that) to watch how he does it, he is probably the only one who can answer your questions.

Or don't worry about how Jeffrey does things, and just gain experience for yourself.

But in this sense, we shouldn't have this website at all. Everything in this website is promoting Jeffrey's competition.

What?! How do you figure?

Is he first building the entire example for himself, explaining it to himself, then speeding up the process, then recording it? Or is he building bits and pieces of the example and recording them sequentially?

I suspect he has at least the outline of whatever full topic worked out in ahead of time. Whether he's gone through and written it or not is questionable.. in most cases though I'd guess not.

Another very good teacher, on a COMPLETELY different type of subject matter is Andrew Kramer of videocopilot. He teaches people how to use Adobe After Effects. I know for certain that he has gone through and made each project at least once ahead of time as he almost always begins each tutorial by showing the end result of his previous pass through the subject matter. It's possible Jeffrey does this, but I'll bet in most cases he does not as a lot of the steps taken in many of the tutorial videos are really just repetition of things he's done hundreds of times previously for other tutorial videos -- or just actually writing real-world code.

Or don't worry about how Jeffrey does things, and just gain experience for yourself.

Ultimately, this.

@jlrdw Thank you.

@willvincent Thanks again.

@jlrdw says and @willvincent agrees about this:

Or don't worry about how Jeffrey does things, and just gain experience for yourself.

I don't agree entirely. If you could figure out everything by yourself, you wouldn't be on this site watching Jeffrey teach you how to do things better, or any tutorial for that matter.

Perfect practice makes perfect. Hence the question.

Beside others comments, may be I can suggest you a Screencast series by Jeffrey way. You may take a look - https://photography.tutsplus.com/courses/pro-screencasting-for-the-rest-of-us

@tisuchi YOU ARE AWE-SO-ME!

I'm watching it now and I will share my impressions here once I'm done studying it.

Thank you so much!

@jlrdw , @willvincent , @Snapey and @tisuchi

I've finished studying the Screencast series and I would like to share my impressions.

First of all, I'm glad that I asked the question and got a very close answer from Mr. @tisuchi and also helpful tips from you folks. Thanks so much.

Secondly, even though most of the screencast series was about how to use tips, I've learned a lot from Jeffrey about what methodology he follows to achieve a high quality screencast. The series was free for a 10 day trial, so if you didn't watch it yet, you will benefit from it quite a bit as well.

And thirdly, if any of you have direct access to @JeffreyWay 's email or other contact info, please ask him to make a fresh series on how to make screencasts as we all want to learn how to code but also want to teach others as well. The series that @tisuchi recommended was exactly 5 years old but again quite helpful.

If you have any other series done directly by @JeffreyWay I'll be glad to watch them so please keep commenting on this topic.

Thank you so much!

Can I also recommend the courses done by Alex at Codecourse.com. There are hundreds of videos on his Youtube channel. There used to be a 'behind the scenes' video also but it seems to have been pulled.

@Snapey Thank you!

I am no Jeffrey Ways by any means, but as a youtuber who makes what I would like to consider at least decent software youtube tutorials I have had and researched this same question numerous times (Actually how I ended up here ironically).

Here's a quick vid to show where I've got my quality so you can determine whether this post is worth reading on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN6VZGGGyP4 or completely ignoring.

The microphone. That was BY FAR the hardest part for me to figure out. Recently invested in this microphone and absolutely love it. (Pinky swear, these are not affiliate links ~ just copied from my amazon ordered page.)
~
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Z2H17XV

Microphone accessories ~ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CN2C93T https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001AUSOAW https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002GXF8Q

Multiple person podcasts (You'll need multiple microphones, get's expensive quickly)
~
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DFU9BRK 


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Video Editing
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https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html





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All in all ~ including room acoustic treatment ~ I've personally invested around ,000 - ,000 trying to figure out everything involved in making a danged software screencast. That includes several foam acoustic treatments, lighting, green screen, and diffusers I didn't link to above -- mainly because I honestly never actually use them.
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If you end up using this set up, let me know! It'd make me better about the thousands I wasted before figuring out how to properly record a damned video.... :)

In all honestly, feel free to reach out with any questions -- I love the idea of getting as many software engineers into teaching high quality tutorials as possible, that kinda quality education made for my edumucation and is the only reason I'm a software engineer today :)

All of that being said, Jeffrey also majored in music theory so matching his audio would be one heck of a challenge and a very pivotal reason he is such a good online educator.

@zhorton999 For some reason, I remembered this question after years and just reading your answer. Sorry that I'm late to recognize that.

I'm using a Shure mic now. It's pretty decent. Thank you again for the links, video, and the response! A highly fluent and useful video!