3DTotal: Hi Papa, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. I'm sure nearly all of our readers have heard about Digital-Tutors and have a good idea what you do, but can you start by giving us some background about how it all started out?
Papa: It started some time ago when I was teaching Advanced Computer Graphics at a college and we made the switch to Maya. I found that students really needed self-paced video lessons that they could refer back to, but this option was seriously lacking. So, I created my own training and this ended up being our first interactive course. I saw the productivity of my students substantially increase and their creativity soar as they were able to really absorb what they were learning and easily apply that to their work. With these results, I thought that other teachers, students and artists might also benefit from these video-based courses and decided to start an educational, creative company: Digital-Tutors.

Over the course of our history, Digital-Tutors has evolved into a dedicated and highly experienced team of in-house instructors, artists, developers, designers and representatives who continue to grow and adjust in our changing industry. And the passion and drive behind this group is really incredible. We stand behind a promise to take technology out of the way so that artists can really focus on the creative aspects of their work and truly become successful.

3DTotal: It’s always good to hear how businesses started out and grew. How many do you have in your team now?
Papa: We’re quite the team actually. We have 18 people, some from right here in Oklahoma and some from countries across the world including Russia and England. We are constantly looking for the best and the brightest; those who have an enormous amount of passion for education, work well in a team environment and are always willing to give 110%.

3DTotal: There have been some big changes recently with what looks like an entire overhaul of your website, structure and system. Can you tell us about this

advantages/disadvantages that you have discovered since the launch?
Papa: Sure. When I first created Digital-Tutors I had a unique idea, but knew I would need to make a substantial financial investment, dedicate time for technology to catch up and bring together a cohesive group of very intelligent people. And when our training library grew to thousands of lessons, I knew the timing was right to create and release an online library of Digital-Tutors training with an interactive platform. It just made sense to offer our extensive collection for one price with different membership plans. We heard from countless customers, studios and schools asking for this new type of model for numerous reasons, such as ease of use rather than lugging around hundreds of discs, access to all software applications without having to pick and choose and, of course, affordability.

Since the launch, the advantages are numerous. Once you see our platform you quickly notice that it’s not just a simple video player. It’s an interactive system that allows you to easily locate the training you want. And by clicking play, you’ll see why it’s better, why it’s different. You’ll see that

within each lesson you can add your own Notes and Tags right from the playhead and add any video to your custom Playlist, as well as your list of Favorites. The best feature is our CLIPS Technology which is just like highlighting in a book, but rather in your videos. With CLIPS you can loop any portion of the lesson to watch over and over and save it within your content for further reference.

The only disadvantages that we’ve had to

face concern those who don’t have an Internet connection. But they can always access our content through their local public library’s computers or at their school.

3DTotal: With this change in format are you finding people generally prefer streaming to downloading?
Papa: I would say that a large majority of our community has come to prefer streaming as opposed to downloading. It took a bit of getting used to, but once artists started seeing the value and benefits of streaming – such as the ability to access our entire library and the opportunity to use some of our great learning tool – the switch was easy.