Vital advice from Warlord at Renderosity, “Making Video Tutorials – Staying on Point”. I suspect I know the recent two-hour slog-a-thon which may have triggered his article, as I saw that one too.
“Practice”, yes, as he stresses. And I’d add that also from practice comes your timing. Don’t spend ages on introductions and ‘Computer Graphics classroom’ theory about isometroptical flange-widgets and how vertex pixel-wiggling happens (that no-one will remember or ever use). Only to run out of time to present the actual useful knowledge for the software in question (i.e. ‘find X here, set Y here, then press this, not that’) that people are waiting for. In such situations you then have to cram it all into four garbled minutes while skipping lots of the juicy stuff. Practice and timing helps you bypass such problems, because you know in advance if it will all fit in the time available.
Also vital advice from Warlord…
Show a clip at the beginning of the tutorial demonstrating the final result.
Good microphones and levels are also a ‘must have’.
I’d add that “can we keep questions to the end please” is also useful to prevent interruptions and sidetracking during a ‘live room’ presentation. A variant for webinars is “questions at the end of each segment, please” although such things can also be done in other ways.