Planned amount $$ (USD): 250 per video + additional 150 for each In-Operation video
Estimated time for completion: 3-4 videos per month if fully approved.
Skills of Contributor: Community support over the last year, commercial UAS experience, attendance to the majority of dev calls over the past year, a few PR’s here and there, studio and video editing experience, issue monitoring, etc.
I am completely open to suggestions and changes to this proposal for the benefit of the community. I would also hope to assemble a small group for peer review and collaboration before publishing.
Interesting proposal and a good idea. One comment I would make from a purely personal/subject point of view, I find it difficult to learn/follow videos - I do much better with a documentation page, step-by-step instructions and pretty pictures. Would be nice to have this as well as/instead of videos. Different people work differently
I personally think a video, plus a transcript is adequate. I generally will watch a video if I need to “See” how to do something, but will scroll through the transcript to quickly see the “tools” that are needed to perform the work.
That’s a good point. The plan is to have the content points scripted. So that the most critical information is communicated concisely. These should be information dense without being boring.
G’day Nathan,
thanks for the proposal.
The team hasn’t voted on this yet, but I thought I’d provide my view.
Many of the topics/videos you suggest require significant contributions from the Dev team. I think most of us would be willing to find time to contribute but I can’t support paying for those episodes.
You offered to put some tutorials together some months ago, and I gave you access to the official YouTube channel to make this easier. It doesn’t sit well with me that you’re now seeking payment.
The one example of where the project has put funding towards YouTube content was subsidising Tiziano’s attendance to InterDrone. That was a marketing activity, funded from the marketing budget, and not a per-video fee. Not a business as usual expense.
YouTube content is great, and would be warmly received if contributed, but is not in my view the highest priority to put operational resources towards. The wiki and test infrastructure are far more important.
When the Funding Committee have properly debated and voted, there’ll be a response here, but I thought it important to let you know what my input to that debate will be.
Thanks for diving into the issues list btw!
First, I should apologize for overcommiting myself last year. I thought I would have time to put together some videos, but I had to put them aside for other prioritized projects. For what it’s worth, I still plan to make a few videos here and there, but I don’t think there’s any way I can spend the amount of time it would take to do this more comprehensive list.
Second, I understand your concern about taking developer time. If you identify those videos, maybe we could arrange a different $$ amount for those videos. They will still take time editing and collaborating though.
On another note, maybe this project could be supported or sponsored by hardware makers that want their equipment shown on the videos. I considered doing sponsor highlight episodes, but there are already a lot of videos proposed, and I wanted to highlight the ones that I thought are the most critical. I’m running this idea through the proposals section because I think your administrative group might be able to delegate funding and resources (sponsorship) more fairly than I can. I think this could be a selling point to that group of donors.
First, thanks again for the proposal. The funding committee has discussed this at length, as we believe that adding more videos is an attractive proposition. After much brainstorming and debate, we have decided to decline this proposal, for the reasons outlined below:
The idea of providing video tutorials (“Setup” and “In-Operations” series) is appealing, as it would undoubtedly benefit users. But there are already many videos out there that have been freely provided, the Painless360 YouTube Pixhawk tutorial series is one out of many examples, plus the dozens of videos already included in the wiki.
Moreover, due to the constant evolution of ArduPilot and GCS software, the content life of the proposed videos would be short, adding complexity to maintain both text wiki and video. This adds a future liability to our current issue of the wiki lagging behind firmware and feature development. Even now it contains a number of videos that are outdated and conflict with the text, with the text also falling behind the code. Work on updating the wiki, therefore, should take higher priority, where funds are not unlimited.
With respect to proposed videos informing about dev team minutes and Ardupilot overview, these would certainly be welcome. Funding one person when numerous others would be involved to script, participate, review and edit isn’t a fair approach to generating that content though. That said we certainly agree that additional attention from developers to provide project direction and roadmap would be welcomed by the Community.
To summarize, we encourage additional videos from the community, but unanimously voted against the use of Ardupilot funds for this endeavor.
