Videos and Online Training

As I’ve mentioned in my last few posts, I’ve been creating a lot of videos lately, and have been working on various online courses.

The picture above is a Camtasia (the software I use for video editing) screen shot of one of my RSLogix 500 course videos. There is a lot of time that goes into creating and editing a video like this; for instance, do you see all of the little segments at the bottom of the screen? That’s audio and screen video where I had to edit out “dead time”. For instance, this is places where there was silence while I’m transitioning from one part to another, where I’m waiting for the software to finish doing something, or where I had to type a lot of stuff into a description field. It takes time to do all of that chopping.

You can also see a lot of graphics that had to be modified and edited into the screens.For this particular course, there are eleven videos of 5-12 minutes each, and it took somewhere around 150 hours to complete. My rate so far on these videos is about 1 hour per minute of completed video. After talking to others who do this, I’ve found that this is fairly normal for more detailed course videos.

This is the actual video that the screenshot shows. I think it’s pretty good and turned out about as well as I could hope for considering I’m not a professional, but that’s a lot of time to put into something that I’m not sure is going to make any money. A seminar I attended the other day said that businesses can expect to pay $5000 to $50,000+ to create a professionally done video course.

There are also already a lot of courses already out there, I am curious about how long it took others to create their courses and videos. If you have any experience with this please let me know. I plan to make this course available for sale on my business website, and I am not 100% sure where I should price it at yet. I have also put off starting my next formal courses on RSLogix Studio 5000, Siemens Step 7 and Siemens TIA Portal, which are all longer courses than this one. The time they will take is somewhat daunting.

I am almost done with a shorter video on Industrial Math, with a second video to follow, and I will be doing one on Ethernet and Industrial Communications also. They are shorter and appropriate for a place like Udemy. I also put my first generic PLC short course on Udemy, but haven’t pushed it.

Because it takes so long to create these training videos, I started another series that is much easier to create. On these, I just start programming and talking, with no graphics and very little editing. These take about 2 hours to create a 13-14 minute video, here is one of them:

I have created three of these so far and plan to keep going. You’ll find more in the intro where I describe what I plan to do. I have put these on my YouTube channel (Automatikai) for free and will probably do so for the next few also.

The big difference is that I can create this type of video much quicker without the fancy graphics and chopping stuff up. But I still want to be able to monetize it somehow… my initial thoughts are to create a subscription model for the much more complex stuff I plan to evolve this into later. If anyone has any comments or ideas I’d love to hear them.

I am also always up for collaboration. I think I’m getting better at this stuff as I go along and can bring value to the discussion.

By the way, here are the other two videos.