Tuts: Do you prefer videos or written tutorials?

[bennyboy]

Depends on the category: for techniques and tips I prefer videos, but for render theory stuff (like optimization) I prefer a written essay. Note: in video, I prefer it to be slow and concise - no speeding through little shortcuts and seemingly unimportant keystrokes - really organized and scripted, but without loosing interest and personality. For written stuff, it really needs to be well written - I get so tired of having to interpret the meaning of broken and bad English (goes for any language). It's hard enough to understand advanced rendering concepts without having to weed through a ton of grammatical errors and typos.

[mikeh]

Interesting question. I would have said written tutorials but when I first tried the Help in max to use "Populate", I bogged down so I Googled Populate videos and found an hour long video that cleared up a lot of questions, one being "Is this software buggy or is it me?" The answer is that Populate is both finicky and buggy.
mh

[trixian]

Written. As mentioned above, to skip the useless stuff and anything you already know (which tends to be a great deal as you get older).
In addition, one of my main reasons to prefer written tuts over videos, is that nearly everyone doing a vid-tut where they talk over and present their "work flow" is really really bad at it. Bad as in; The pain and discomfort you experience while making the tut, is directly conveyed to the viewer, in addition to the fact that you are likely wrong, and do thing in a backwards way.

Regardless of the fact that it might be a free tut, the pain and discomfort is there anyway, listening to someone screech and mumble while they nervously miss click and occasionally pause to think about their mundane existences. Plus, you wasted precious time.
(Ok, this might be a bit harsh and was ever so slightly over-dramatised).

In any case, a well thought out and presented tut is superior to a "hey I just found this out, and I think I'm the only person alive that did, regardless of what google tells me" type tut that saturates the web these days, regardless of medium. I recently tried reading though the mad rambling of some Frenchman regarding realtime shaders and behaviours of materials in the real world, and as time went on I started to question my sanity. It was appalling, and really long.
While never having made one my self, I think the work required to make a proper good tut written is less, and lets you edit it later on if you notice mistakes etc, while making a proper vid takes more time, more rehearsal, and once its out there, you're stuck with it unless you remove it completely.

[tricky]

Videos, when the phrase "go ahead" is kept to a bare minimum.

Let me go ahead and agree with you on that one.

Personally I prefer videos as I can pick up a lot more in a shorter time.

[kalamazandy]

Most of the time I'm looking for one bit of information that I can't figure out. That's pretty easy to find in written tutorials. It can be Torture in video. Even scripted videos that are done pretty well end up including a bunch of basic information that nearly everyone should already know.

If both are done well, I still go for written. People here are trying to compare apples and oranges. You can't compare a poorly written tutorial with a great video, or bad video with great written tutorial.