Today we're pleased to announce the general availability of a new product to supplement our Sandvox website builder. It's a screencast training course, divided into nineteen chapters and clocking in at a total running time of two and a half hours.
We started this project late last year, building upon some of the topical screencasts we had been creating every so often. We heard from a lot of our customers that they were looking for a tutorial approach to learning, so we embarked on this project.
Little did we know how much work it was going to be! The writing and organization of the course and "shooting" script, the actual creation and editing of the screencasts, the fancy title sequence, processing and saving the movie files, packaging up the DVD for production and making the videos available online have all been a lot of work. We (and/or the folks we hired to help us) couldn't have done it without tools like ScreenFlow for the actual screen capture, After Effects for the title sequence, Box Shot 3D for the nice images of the DVD and case, Acorn for various graphics, Apple's Pages for layout of the DVD cover art and the transcripts of the course, and SimpleMovieX for batch conversion of videos. (Actually we're doing some last-minute exports so that the videos will be viewable on the iPad. Please stay tuned if you are having issues watching the movies on your iPad.)
We're pretty proud of the end result, and the early feedback we've received has been largely positive. We hope that this optional add-on training will be useful to a lot of Sandvox users.