PolySculpt

If you miss that news these last days, The Gnomon Workshop, the famous Art School in Los Angeles just open a new Subscription section on their website, which give the access to all their video training available in DVD.
This is a review of this offer and let’s be direct and simple, this is a fabulous one (the offer )!

The Gnomon Workshop offers three different plans at, as you guess, different prices.

• Plan 1: all the Gnomon tutorials for $499/year
• Plan 2: visual effects & games for $299/year
• Plan 3: design & traditional for $299/year

To preview the content of each plan, you can browse in their content navigator and discover what are they offering for each section, or chose by software / media. And for each video, you can view the details by being forwarded to the web page of the DVD description. One of my “negative” comment (I have to find some of them!!) is that you need to go out of the webpage to view the details. A couple of screenshots and a short summary may have been better. The content listing for each plan is available in the last tab, with the title of each DVD and a link to its description.

After choosing your plan, let’s start watching… well, let’s find where to start! So much learning material in so many different fields. This is the very good point of this Subscriptions: tons and tons of content ready to be watched.

On the left, the software or category of content, and on the right, the listing of the titles available. Clicking on the title display the chapters to watch.

All the videos are done by the best artists in the industry, and these videos are really targeted for the artists: for the artists by the artists. I already own several Gnomon DVDs and for someone like me, they are excellent and I’ve never been disappointed by the training. I can’t judge all the material training because I need to watch a lot more, but my first feedback is very positive.

My first choice was the last videos of Ryan Kingslien, dedicated to the ZSpheres II and ZSketch. I won’t comment the video here, I will do a dedicated post for this training.
The quality of the video was very good with a crystal clear sound and the streaming speed was very fast for me, who is located in France, far from their US servers. Then, instead of taking a look at the website for a description, I can just pick a video and start watching a random chapter to have a first feedback about the content.
You can switch to full screen view at anytime, pause, move to a specific position in the timeline without any troubles. My other negative comment is that you can’t download a training for an offline viewing (when I’m in the train..) but well, it’s an “-online- training subscriptions”! The DVDs are here for this purpose

The online player (Flash based) with the last Ryan Kingslien training. Click to enlarge  for a 100% size.

Conclusion

One of the best training school/company which offer all its content for$499/year, with the best artists teaching you the most important software and medias. Where is the daylight robbery? There is not!
If you need to learn then, it’s the best deal available! Tons and tons of content to learn, to improve your skills, what else?
Sorry for the short review, I have to go watching more training!

Pros:

• Really worth the money!
• Tons of content for all kind of medias and software.
• The best artists and trainer in the industry.
• High quality and fast streaming.

Cons (it’s to say there is cons…):

• No cons in fact, I write some to avoid saying that it’s perfect
• Gnomonology.com content isn’t available (or I didn’t find it).
• No download for offline watching.