A friend of mine has started doing a series of sort of introductory videos to various pinball machines:

I'm really digging the production values, and I think those videos are doing a pretty sweet job at conveying the basic ideas to someone who's not familiar with those machines yet. What do you guys think?

Warning: German, but fully subtitled.

The PAPA videos are great, I've watched pretty much all of them. The tutorials are amazing, but I find the gameplay videos a bit hard to follow if I haven't played the machine before – that's why I was pretty impressed by the way those videos show off the various features in a way that I actually get what's going on.

I don't know, that switch to the PAPA live broadcasts was really cool, because there's much more content available now for guys like me, who are thrilled to watch 10 hours of raw Expo footage, but sometimes I feel like a bit of editing wouldn't hurt. On the old PAPA website (or rather pinball.org/videos), you could search for a specific machine and get tournament coverage of that machine. With the live broadcasts, that's gone now. Even Bowen's tutorials, which I enjoy a lot, seem a bit watered down with the live format, as opposed to watching just that one game that went really well.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, I feel like there's a lack of sweet and short high quality content right now, and I was pleasantly surprised to see those videos hit that spot for me.

Nice to hear that the tutorials aren't going away. I know that it's probably more about the time commitment than the travel costs, but if you did an informal kickstarter to secure the travel funds for more tutorials, I'd pledge my money in a heartbeat.

As for the video search, it's not as helpful as it could be, I'm afraid. If I search for "Metallica", for instance, the first two results are the tutorial, and the next two are some random tournament videos without any Metallica footage at all, followed by lots of other stuff I didn't look through in detail, but which looked pretty random on first glance, too.

Of course, the new broadcast format doesn't facilitate search, and some of the old tournament videos can still be found, but I wish I could just type in "Star Trek" and have Engelbrektsson's Expo footage in the results. Well, can't have your cake and eat it too, I guess. Anybody interested in helping to timestamp and tag the existing live footage?

I'm in the process of timestamping and tagging all the PAPA videos to provide a working machine and player search. I've got about a quarter of the videos done right now, and once it's finished, I'll put up a search page that actually gives you the results you're looking for. I don't know all of the players by sight, so I'm gonna rely on some community effort to finish the tagging, but I think it's gonna be pretty neat.

The first version is up and running, see https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/papa-video-search-i-need-your-help.