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Making educational videos with a drawing tablet

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Overview

Drawing tablets are heavily used for creating educational content. For example you've probably seen the Khan Academy videos and those are created with a drawing tablet.

For this you want high reliability and durability and you DO NOT need to spend a lot of money buying a fancy tablet. And for those reasons I'll keep the recommendations short:

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What features you need

  • Pressure support - Will help you strokes look more natural. All drawing tablets have this pressure support.

  • Tilt - not needed for education use. More of an artist thing.

  • Tablet buttons (aka. ExpressKeys) - I think they can come in very useful for people. For some people these are critical. No harm in getting them, you can always disable them.

  • Size - Medium or Small. I always recommend medium. Even though some people are OK with small tablets, I do see a far number of people say the small size makes their hand feel cramped.

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My recommendations

Pen tablets (no screen)

  • One by Wacom Medium (CTL-672) - Notes on this tablet

  • Wacom Intuos Medium (CTL-6100 or CTL-6100WL)

  • XP-Pen Deco MW

  • XP-Pen Deco LW

Pen displays (have a screen)

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Which tablet does Sal Khan use?

Sal Khan uses a Wacom Intuos Pro Medium for his videos. That is an AMAZING pen tablet (screenless tablet), but honestly overkill. You can get by with a much less expensive tablet.

He looks to be using an older Intuos Pro medium (not the PTH-660, or PTK-570, maybe the PTK-651).

Note that the Khan Academy has this document What software program/equipment is used to make Khan Academy videos?arrow-up-right In that doc, they say he uses a Wacom Bamboo tablet. I suspect this probably was true at some point, but he clearly no longer uses it.

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Resources

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