I’m not sure how viable it would be, but it would be interesting to see a couple of people’s take on the same thing. You don’t have to duplicate the whole topic but maybe just a brief ‘here’s another way to do that,’ on a tricky or hard to understand area from another viewpoint. I’m thinking of all the programming or 3D examples I can follow up to a certain point and then get a bit lost. Later on, I’ll see the same topic covered by someone else and get the ‘aha, so that’s how it’s done/what it means’ moment.

Along the same multi-presenter lines, I think it would be cool to see a series with multiple people doing a single project from concept through modeling etc. to postwork. It wouldn’t have to be elaborate, in fact, simpler would probably be better. People could dip in where they wanted. If you’re only interested in lighting and postwork, skip the modeling etc. parts. Throughout the presentation, perhaps the various artists could comment on how their work all fit together and how they collaborated. A wrap up roundtable would be nice. Of course this is the way things get done on professional productions and, the typical hobbyist either does them all themselves or more likely purchases the components. Still, I think they might find it interesting and the individual elements would work as standalone training.

Birn used to have a site (3D Render Challenge?), which may still be up though I think someone else took up running it. That had a variety of great modeled scenes for people to try their hand at texturing, lighting, and rendering in their 3D application of choice. Something similar would be interesting with the same scene done by various artists. Bonus points if the content is available for the students to play along.

Moriador brings up a good point r.e. rambling. Probably the main nit pick I have with the geekatplay videos is the 'hit the wrong button', or the 'no, I think I’ll use this other texture moments – just generalizing here. Those are inevitable, even with an expert, but that’s where I would think that editing would come in and perhaps a pre-recording run through. Now maybe that’s the nature of more affordable training and maybe the type of product Teyon mentions is all hit the mark perfect in that regard I don’t know. I’d still put up with the minor annoyance for the price differential, but there should be a happy median. Subject matter expertise doesn’t make a great presenter, probably a fairly rare combination. That’s where a good editor, producer/director is probably invaluable. I can see how it can get expensive to produce.

If some of us are right and the Poser market won’t bear the price, what do you do? You don’t want to lower your quality for them. If you do Poser at reduced prices and rely on volume, I can almost guarantee that even those customers who look down on Poser as a toy will want some of those ‘toy’ prices themselves. It might almost be better to do Poser, DAZ Studio, entry level Vue, PaintShop Pro etc. as a separate division for consumer programs. Of course, this may be undesirable for any number of reasons, and for that matter, any pricing skepticism may be unwarranted. 

Good point also r.e. search capability. They have some pretty neat technology IIRC based on voice recognition for video indexing albeit possibly price prohibitive. I can remember eagerly searching for ‘cigar’ back during the Lewinsky flap ÷) Maybe a .pdf transcript with links to points in the video would be nice. I’m sure there’s all sorts of tech out there I don’t even know about. Beyond having Sally say she’s having trouble with X, if she can show her screen and what she’s doing, it would be a tremendous help for everyone. I don’t have the bandwidth to even think about that kind of interaction but I can see how if you can pull it off there’s a world of possibilities. If you can bundle things up in a DVD, there are still a few people who may find it inconvenient to download multi-gigabyte presentations – sacred devotional material aside.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken