Attention Captivation
Ranging from approximately five to thirteen minutes per training, if you can fall asleep in these sessions, you’ve got a concussion of some sort! Besides the training’s fairly short length, the up-tempo tone to Dickinson’s voice and the speed at which he directs you will definitely keep you alert.
Reusability
This is a training series that is very easy to use and reuse. The clever folks Toolfarm learned from other folks mistakes when it came to trying to convert training to Flash and just made their training packages in simple to understand Quicktime files. In addition to being simpler than trying to code things into Flash, QT files are much more resizable, respond to common keyboard commands for video playback, and can be permanently placed “on top” so that you can see it as a Picture-in-picture over your After Effects interface.
The training for the first two lessons were 35 MB and 56 MB respectively, so, provided you have a decent sized hard drive, you should be able to keep a number of video lessons of this on your computer without endangering critical hard drive space. (Their size does make them a little unwieldy for folks who don’t have broadband, however.)
Value vs. Cost
Like I said earlier, $5 per lesson with easy to preview demo screens showing what type of training you’re getting is so unbelievably cost effective that it can’t get too much better than this. If they can keep future training modules at this price, I think that these may be some of the best values on the market.
To make things even sweeter, they're giving you the first module to download completely free.
Overall Comment
Although Michele Yamazaki and the good folks over at Toolfarm did ignore my advice to change the name of the training to: Toolfarm a la Carte, this is still a great idea for a series and has shown to be impressive in its initial installments. If future lessons continue to show this level of concise helpfulness, then this may be one of the best ways of delivering training to the people. Now, if they’ll just add systems for more complex special effects, color correcting trouble footage, and other film specific subjects in this buy-what-you-need format, they just might take over the training world!
You definitely owe it to yourself to download the free first lesson and see if you don't find it simple and easy to follow!
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Comprehension |
9.5 |
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Depth
of Information |
9.0 |
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Interest
Level |
10.0 |
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Reusability |
9.5 |
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Value
vs. Cost |
10.0 |
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Overall
Score |
9.6
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