Creating a Panda3D tutorial for YouTube

The anatomy of a coding video

I just released a Panda3D tutorial on YouTube, and I thought it would be fun to show how I produce coding tutorial videos.

Hello World

The first step is to decide what the video will be about and who the target audience will be.

It isn’t easy to create a generic tutorial from scratch, so I almost always use documentation or a written tutorial from an authoritative source, such as the official docs!

Some people learn from watching or listening rather than just reading a tutorial, which has the added benefit of expanding on the pre-existing learning material.

Writing the script

Coding while speaking is extremely difficult, so I generally avoid it. Instead, I follow the docs myself to ensure everything works and is something I can repeat while recording.

I consider the “gotcha’s” and pitfalls the target viewer might run into while following the tutorial and make notes to highlight those.

Each script is different, and they don’t typically look or sound like the actual voice-overs I record because of my delivery style.

The Voice Over

Once I’ve written the technical details for the script, I write intro and outro pieces to help the tutorial flow together.

I use Audacity to record the voice over in a single take. I take long pauses between paragraphs and cut the whitespace out to make the voice-over sound cohesive.

I usually read the script aloud to myself first, and then again, to avoid sounding like I’m literally reading something.

Coding Footage

This part is usually the most challenging part of producing coding videos.

For Panda3D, each page of the tutorial was a segment. This made it easy to split up the clips.

I resized the Visual Studio Code window to fit in the middle of my desktop so that I could zoom in without worrying about text scaling.

While typing out the code, I had to be mindful to type slow so that it is easier to speed up the footage in editing if I needed to.

Before running the code, I always copy & paste the code from the tutorial because mistakes happen, and they can ruin segments of footage.

Editing

Editing the footage & voice over isn’t difficult, but it is tedious and is probably my least favorite part of producing coding videos.

Lots of footage is cut because my voice overs are much shorter in length than the amount of coding footage I capture.

Almost every clip needs to be zoomed in, and the video editor I use does not like having lots of effects on a single track.

Most clips need to have their speed modified as well, so that’s an additional effect layered on the track.

Another tricky part of editing is filler footage when I am talking about something tangentially related, such as history or related tools and frameworks.

Retrospect

I like to think that my formula for coding videos maximizes the value of the pre-existing tutorials and docs out there; I’m not trying to invent my own development course.

If you are thinking of producing a coding video yourself, let me know about your production style! Do you prefer to speak & code while recording, or do you have another method?