YouTube Tutorials

[DeanLong]

Hey guys and girls,

This may be better presented on ETC and I am sure the gatekeeper will decide and move it if it does. But I am curious how many of you when faced with a design challenge or situationwill go on YouTube and search for a tutorial clip. Is it effective for you?I am toying around with the idea of creating tutorial clips and sharing almost 30 years of experience on Pro. But I am still a working stiff so it would take time out of work schedule to do it. And of course, in the New World Order, nobody pays for training unless they are in a classroom. At my age, to build a following where advertisers would want to run ads on my YouTube channel is highly unlikely. Writing books is futile as many tried that early on in Pro/E world.

I am just asking for opinions if it's worth the time deviation, if anyone else has done it and does it even matter in a world of free labor? Thoughts?

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[jelpedes1]

Subscribe

[TomU]

I am getting ready to evaluate a product called "Nitro-CELL" from

[ptc-1932745]

More and more this is my preferred mode of learning new stuff for most (if not all) of my software.

The best thing about youtube is that is almost truly portable. OSX, Win, Linux, Android, ...

Please do us a favor and segregate the videos by task and CAD version (WF5, CREO2, etc...)
I am currently upgrading to CREO2 from CE/P5 and (of course) the PTC help has references to workflows etc... pre-CREO. Very confusing.

Christopher F. Gosnell

FPD Company
124 Hidden Valley Road
McMurray, PA 15317

[pdkoren]

My company blocks ALL youtube videos, but I have on occasion emailed the link to my home address and watched them there... Usually, you can find a non-video answer to querry's, just may take a little more looking...

[rrich]

Dean I think this is directed to you but I did not get in on the first email of this stream.

Where to begin. First off, books are still useful to some people. A friend of mine Mike Brattoli has written Creo books and gone through self-publishing to distribute them. I don’t think you will get rich doing it but it will pay back some. Secondly Mike took his book to the college he teaches adjunct at and they use it as the course material so it is like building in a market place. You can find his books at www.lulu.com<">http://www.lulu.com> search for Creo. Mike will most likely read this and chime in but what he does is very worth wild.

As for videos get some help it is a major undertaking to do good videos. Some of the best I have seen and learned from have been Leo Green’s at

[DeanLong]

Thanks (so far) for all the cool responses. By cool, I mean nobody has said I am a Dope for even having the idea. I too have watched YouTube and found it to be okay...but very dry and impersonal. A lot of do this, do that,click here, zoom/pan/rotate, click here, click there.....voila, all done...grab a lollie-pop on your way out. Leaves me cold....as design is a passion for me. I will not get on the Old Geezer diatribe here, as I am sure most of you know I could. But MCAD in general has become too sterile and ...well maybe we leave that for another day...or maybe my first upload? ;o) So, special mentions....

Ron Rich: While I do not know Mike Brattolli personally, I have many years of exposure to him and his books. Great stuff. He is a Pro/E storm trooper from way back. Videos don't seemd to be so difficult now with the tools at hand. I have been playing around recently and honestly, the only stumble I have is when my office phone rings I have to pick it up. Hmmm...silence the ringer might be a good idea.

Your point of RUG's. Not to sound dismissive on that, but been there and done that. I was the Great Lakes RUG Prez for three years and it's definitely a labor of love. Also, I am not in a geographic area of "massive Creo" users so no RUG even exists.

Scott Rockwell: You have touched on the kernal of why I even give this a more than passing thought. Generic, canned stuff has never been very effective. Whenever I train people, I have insisted I sit at their station, with their configs doing their products. I never made sense to me to teach someone how to model a bathtub when they are tasked with making turbines. So, part of my "thought" is to get some generic things out there common to all then solicit requests, create my version and then post for all to see....but specifically to one who asked.

Steve Lucas: You have me mixed up with someone else as I have not yet put any YouTube videos out yet. However, is it possible you attened a training seminar at one point?

Tom Uminn: Good info and looks like a potential partner.

John Wayman: I like your optimism, dude. Here, here to the virality of MCAD!

Jerry Elpedes: You sir have the unique position of testifying that I am indeed a Geezer from way back. We worked together as far back as 1991-ish and it's good to see you have stuck with it. All those days of Bill's crazy 6 minute timesheet documention every Monday morning and pushing Pro/Program to its breaking point. Good times....

Again, thanks to all you guys for keeping this hair brained idea alive for one more day, at least.

[DeanLong]

Oh and...

Bernie Gruman: Another Pro/E Storm Trooper. I am not sure how what I may create could help situations like yours and provide a little shuffle board betting money for me. That is the step of faith I grapple with at the moment.

Paul Korenkiewicz: (of diesel engine designfame from way back in Auburn Hills) We need to get your current company to unblock access to the gold, my friend.

[jelpedes1]

Dean Long,
Good times indeed at Bill’s shop. Timesheet or TPS Reports, pick your gratuitous mundane office paperwork. Nevertheless, a well-organized Creo YouTube knowledge base will be a great resource for the user community and I look forward to it.

Chris Gosnell,
Perhaps we have an opportunity to append the quote you have from Confucius ☺

I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
Have YouTube and do all three.
Rinse, lather and repeat.

[MikeBrattoli]

First of all, thanks for the kind words. I spent a lot of time looking at written manuals and books and found a number of them to be okay but often written/developed by individuals who had never worked in industry designing products! Many of these manuscripts provide step by step instructions and exercises but fail to address the most important question someone needs to know when learning Pro/E & Creo – WHY AM I MAKING THESE PICKS OR USING THIS TECHNIQUE? The hardest part of teaching Pro/E and now Creo (started using Pro/E with release 11 and started teaching it at the college level with release 15) is matching the “learning technique” to the student and answering the “WHY” of it all.

I finally ended up writing my own books because I wasn’t totally satisfied with what was available. As mentioned by Jerry below, sharing 20 years worth of PTC product experience is a very worthwhile experience but unless you want to try and make a living from the endeavor you won’t get rich doing so on a part time basis. I’m lucky that my employer has supported by self-publishing activities and uses what I wrote to support our internal users (along with PTC eLearning).

As noted below and in other comments about this topic, some people learn best using a written manual/book (you can usually tell how often it’s referenced by the number of post it notes and highlighted sections they have), while others are very comfortable using a video based path to learning the required techniques/picks.

My college course has included a wide variety of users – young college age students who are incredibly comfortable with the digital age (You Tube, Twitter, Web based eLearning, etc….) mixed in with older men/women who have engineering/design experience but did most of their work using AutoCAD or other 2D tools and need to retrain themselves to work in a 3D world. I’ve found that offering a mix of tools including written and digital content provides the “student” with the optimum way of learning the application.

Based on personal experiences I would recommend You Tube,

[bkurth]

Dean,

Something for you to consider, is that you already have a following. You're a respected individual here on this forum, and there are a lot of us here! For you to offer your wisdom up to us in a manner that makes it easy to find, and use, I think would be a great thing. I would subscribe, for sure.

I think once you started putting them up, and we found out, word of mouth here, would drive traffic there. We are all in need of good methods to make us better. I wouldn't be concerned about your age being a limiter...your knowledge is still just as valid.

There are my thoughts...

Brian

In Reply to Dean Long:

Hey guys and girls,

This may be better presented on ETC and I am sure the gatekeeper will decide and move it if it does. But I am curious how many of you when faced with a design challenge or situationwill go on YouTube and search for a tutorial clip. Is it effective for you?I am toying around with the idea of creating tutorial clips and sharing almost 30 years of experience on Pro. But I am still a working stiff so it would take time out of work schedule to do it. And of course, in the New World Order, nobody pays for training unless they are in a classroom. At my age, to build a following where advertisers would want to run ads on my YouTube channel is highly unlikely. Writing books is futile as many tried that early on in Pro/E world.

I am just asking for opinions if it's worth the time deviation, if anyone else has done it and does it even matter in a world of free labor? Thoughts?

[kimndave9]

If it could be combined with a Wiki it would be a winner.

Here's an existing example http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Pro_Engineer

Anyone can edit any page, but there's history of all changes and a comparison tool for all versions to keep things straight, as well as the 'Talk' extension that handles discussions about the content without needing to change the content.

The problem I have in finding things on YouTube is that the search function doesn't have a good way to evaluate the content and YouTube doesn't have a good way to group content from various sources.

With a Wiki driving it, one can have a page on using layer rules that has links to YouTube, a textual description, a link to help files and links to a page about layers. Descriptions of the YouTube videos can provide helpful information that is not available at the time the video is made, such as whether it still applies to later versions or that a new video is applicable or required.

Another great feature of Wikis (there are several code bases for them) is that even if the page organization changes, the pages don't. When an index gets too unwieldly, it can be split to other pages, but other pages that link to the same indexed pages don't have to change. If a page name is changed, the links are automatically updated to use the new name, so the indexes are still good.

My own Wiki (A TikiWiki base) has around 200+ pages for ProE; A page can link to videos, ptc community, PTC/User, other pages, PDFs, Word, Excel, AutoIT, Windows CMD page, et al. It is a fast, terrific interface for organizing that which cannot otherwise be organized. I prefer TikiWiki as it includes a back-links drop down to tell how many pages refer to the one I'm on. Since links are created ahead of page creation, there can be any number of pages that refer to a not-yet-created page. It is interesting to create a MIL spec page and see the dozen or more pages that had references waiting for the page.

[nrollins]

Wow - that is a great idea. And not a new one based on how much content you
have. I assume a link to download an example / tutorial part is possible as
well.?



I assume the red links go to an empty page that is looking for content from
you or a contributor? I intend to get an account and check out the great
resource that is there. The site definitely has the potential to be an
extremely valuable tool for learning and reference.



Thanks for sharing that.

-Nate

[mganzer]

I actually used to create these when I was at a reseller. We recorded them using one of our GoToMeeting accounts and processed down the recorded "meeting" We got some good feedback from customers on them. All pretty short tips and tricks. You can see them here:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAggF1tErABm8oycYJ0qxndA2Dlw0MxqT

[kimndave9]

Mine is only on my computer; the one on the web is part of the Wikibooks initiative. It would be best if PTC/User or -shudder- PTC set up their own. (The -shudder- is that PTC really likes to control things; like only letting current paying customers participate in certain areas, which would leave me out of participating. The wiki could easily absorb all of Help, SPRs, TPIs. It's like the Blob for information. Or the Borg.)

My own wiki has more than 3700 pages.Some are stubs, some are fairly lengthy. An individual page can absorb the text from almost entire MIL specs.

The wikibooks Wiki only needs an account if you want to keep your IP address off the edits. It also has sandbox feature to make edits and see what they look like without committing. You don't need to sign in to see anything. It appears to be moderated at least by an account "QuiteUnusual". You can look at the view history tab of the first page and see he rejected some change. Click the pages to do a comparison to see the sort of change that was rejected.

If it was an independent Wiki, I can see where individuals would also create their own pages to provide custom views/organization of pages. I'm not sure that individual pages is part of Wikibook's concept of operations. It's something I do in my own. Rather than someone new having to piece together all the documentation for a sub-skill, such a designing gear trains, from general principles, assembly, parts of Mechanica Structure and Mechanica motion, there could be a page that links directly to those pieces that are especially related to the task. Other users of that information would create a link on their own page and so on.

In Reply to Nathan Rollins:

Wow - that is a great idea. And not a new one based on how much content you
have. I assume a link to download an example / tutorial part is possible as
well.?



I assume the red links go to an empty page that is looking for content from
you or a contributor? I intend to get an account and check out the great
resource that is there. The site definitely has the potential to be an
extremely valuable tool for learning and reference.



Thanks for sharing that.

-Nate

x

[kimndave9]

Great, now I'm responding to myself.

First, Wikibooks uses Wikipedia logins; just tried it, so they probably share Wikipedia rules.

Also -

"An individual page can absorb the text from almost entire MIL specs." is awkwardly worded and should say -

"An individual page can absorb the entire text from most any individual MIL spec."

More things to like - Wikis are manageable. If there are two pages that cover similar information, the contents can be merged and the refering pages corrected to refer to the merged page, unlike a forum format where the same question gets asked over and over with varying answers that may not be followed up or are wrong and can't be corrected. It's a better place to store information. It isn't a substitute for an e-mail exploder which can provide answers for new problems or unique situations.

[DanGlenn]

We (PTC/USER) are interested in providing something like this if there are
authors out there willing to create content and help us organize it. I'll
look through the messages more thoroughly this weekend to catch up on the
conversation. We do have the capability on the portal to set up a Wiki and
getting a Youtube Channel is easy enough to set up.

What I would like input on initially is some perspectives on how to
organize the Wiki and Youtube Channel content. Suggested topic headings and
an organizational structure you all would find useful to set up an initial
framework so we can both populate the information in an organized way and
be able to find it. What kind of attributes or TAGs would you all
recommend? Software (Creo Parametric, Creo View ...) Version? Subject? etc.

Anything else that would help on the setup side?

Thanks for initiating this conversation,

Dan Glenn
PTC/USER Portal Admin
PLM Lead, Solar Turbines Incorporated
On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 12:28 PM, David Schenken <->
wrote:

> Mine is only on my computer; the one on the web is part of the Wikibooks
> initiative. It would be best if PTC/User or -shudder- PTC set up their own.
> (The -shudder- is that PTC really likes to control things; like only
> letting current paying customers participate in certain areas, which would
> leave me out of participating. The wiki could easily absorb all of Help,
> SPRs, TPIs. It's like the Blob for information. Or the Borg.)
>
> My own wiki has more than 3700 pages.Some are stubs, some are fairly
> lengthy. An individual page can absorb the text from almost entire MIL
> specs.
>
> The wikibooks Wiki only needs an account if you want to keep your IP
> address off the edits. It also has sandbox feature to make edits and see
> what they look like without committing. You don't need to sign in to see
> anything. It appears to be moderated at least by an account "QuiteUnusual".
> You can look at the view history tab of the first page and see he rejected
> some change. Click the pages to do a comparison to see the sort of change
> that was rejected.
>
> If it was an independent Wiki, I can see where individuals would also
> create their own pages to provide custom views/organization of pages. I'm
> not sure that individual pages is part of Wikibook's concept of operations.
> It's something I do in my own. Rather than someone new having to piece
> together all the documentation for a sub-skill, such a designing gear
> trains, from general principles, assembly, parts of Mechanica Structure and
> Mechanica motion, there could be a page that links directly to those pieces
> that are especially related to the task. Other users of that information
> would create a link on their own page and so on.
>
>
> In Reply to Nathan Rollins:
>
> Wow - that is a great idea. And not a new one based on how much content you
> have. I assume a link to download an example / tutorial part is possible as
> well.?
>
>
>
> I assume the red links go to an empty page that is looking for content from
> you or a contributor? I intend to get an account and check out the great
> resource that is there. The site definitely has the potential to be an
> extremely valuable tool for learning and reference.
>
>
>
> Thanks for sharing that.
>
> -Nate
>
>
>
> x
>

[davehaigh]

One thing that makes the PTC videos and other's I've seen hard to follow is they are just a static recording of the full screen.

At the small size they are presented on the web, it's sometimes difficult to follow where the mouse went.

This is where Camtasia excels. You record the whole screen, and then after the fact you can zoom up on any area.
This does two things, it lets the viewer actually see what your picking, and it keeps the viewer interested because the screen isn't static.

Watch any good movie or TV show, there is almost no static shots, the camera is always moving.

Here are some old examples from my ProE Admin 101 talk. Download and unzip to view the AVI files.

[kimndave9]

Which Camtasia are you using? Free or paid?

I really enjoyed your presentations.

x

[davehaigh]

The paid version.

David Haigh

[DeanLong]

I am not sure how todigest all the sudden interest in this thread from the stand point of getting Google and Wiki pages linked with all the automatic content building and coding search tags, linking back to sites and pagesX, Y and Z. Thethread startedwith a somewhat benignquestioning of fellow users on their use of Youtube to learn, gather insight and experience. I concede it is most likely the very hip and knowledgable users are simply lending their experience and insight about what a great web presence could look like. I appreciate that. However, and please forgive the assumption if I am off base but, the thread has taken a detour from the original intent. It was intended to give me an idea if YouTube is still a viable tool and if I created a YouTube Channel, would it be of use to those on the forum if they were to subscribe. I was not looking to build a web empire. I am just a simple, old school,CADMonkey that is looking for a way to give back to a community that I have a heart for and hopefully keep me relevant into my third act of life. And without any hidden agenda, hopefully, as a subscription basegains users, I may be able to earn some ad dollars to help me buy some Depends when the day comes.

So, with that, I have created my first YouTube channel. It's a simple beginning, as I am just starting to learn the in's and out's of the process. As I gather knowledge and a following, I hope to get much better. Thanks to Nate Rollins for being instrumental in thecurrent and future"betterment" of the endeavor altogether. I hope it becomes something useful for you guys.

I encourage feedback from everyone....if it's good, please say so. If it's crap...say that too. I will respect all the feedback and make an effort to get better as I go along.I have always had a problem with disconnected training.Meaning, it never made much sense to me toteach someone how to model a bath tub if theyare tasked with modeling turbines. So,if you have anything specific you want demonstrated with my spin added, let me know. I will do my best to cover it.Keep in mind I am still working for a living so it may take a bit of time to get to, butI promise to do my best.

Thank you guys....and tell all your friends ;o)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMHXcBmcskIhfsZkDDKOhUg

[StephenW]

I'm subscribed. First video I looked at was sketcher orientation. A guy just asked me about that last week. I'm gonna send him there.

[JoshuaHouser]

Looking good Dean!

I've only reviewed the variable draft video so far. The video quality is good as well as the sound. The time of the video works well for me, as I would usually want quick answers. This makes it easy to search for functionality I'm interested in.

Best of luck, I hope you can continue to make these videos. I will share the channel internally and externally.

Joshua Houser

(have I talked to you about FIRST robotics yet?)

Pelco by Schneider Electric

MCAD Range Technical Officer

[DeanLong]

Guys and girls,

Thanks for the subscriptions! That is kind of cool.....makes a bit mushy.

Question: Do you prefer short "to the point" littleclips or feature length webinar type demos? I ask because, contrary to the PR and Marketing hype, designing something well takes preparation, thought and time to do. I have had a couple people give feedback that they would have preferredthe first little demos I did to go faster. But they are only 4 - 6 minutes. How much faster can they be and also be effective?

Thanks for any input you can share.

[rrich]

Keep it under 10 min. 3-5min is sweet spot.

Ron

[rrich]

If you need more than 10 min then make title Sketcher part 1 of X and put a link to all the part on every post.

Ron

[cdspk]

I also prefer to use Youtube as a backup to text/image based pages. For my student site I use a Wordpress blog as it's very easy to develop and modify and I embed the youtube vids in the page. I use text on the vids rather than voice over so you can pause the vid, has worked for me for many years and has turned into a substantial site, the issue is always updating to the next release - try and make things as generic as poss. we do a lot of surface modelling where this works well,

Cheers, Sean

CADCAM@LDS - http://vleblog.lboro.ac.uk/cad/

Degree Show - http://www.ldsdegreeshow.co.uk/

Department Home - http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/lds