Ask HN: How much effort it takes to build decent video/interactive explainers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much effort it takes to build decent video/interactive explainers?

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I am referring math videos by 3b1b made with manim, blogs with interactive explorables etc. 3b1b makes stunning content but at a slow pace of two months or so per video. What is slowing them? Is it due to difficulty to create prototype because of clunky tools, or slow hardware that drags REPL behind? In addition to the abundance of programming languages and animation tools, What software or medium can we create to make this process more efficient?

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they are probably satisfied with the 2 months per video pace. In general content creators seem to experiment a lot until they get to a sweet spot with their audience for their type of content. Also we underestimate the effort researching and putting together high quality content, on top of production effort and the admin effort around running a channel like that.

But it would be interesting to know if there is a tools issue holding them back. Lots of smart engineers here looking to build products to solve for that.

-- But it would be interesting to know if there is a tools issue holding them back. My friend was working with a explainer video project using manim and AE lately, and it was a hell of a hassle. So much tweaking and waiting for rendering to complete. I never thought some simple animation of moving a ball could take a whole night.

-- In general content creators seem to experiment a lot until they get to a sweet spot with their audience for their type of content. If only each turn of experiment is as fast as it could get..

-- Lots of smart engineers here looking to build products to solve for that. Can you name some example? Love to try them out.

Interesting to see https://github.com/3b1b/manim where the YouTuber has created a software tool to automate his work.

> never thought some simple animation of moving a ball could take a whole night

yeah always surprising (more complexity that expected) when we look under the hood of any operation

> Can you name some example...

https://www.videoscribe.co/en/ is used by a few creators on YT, you must have seen their videos. I wonder who is building the tool itself.

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