Fun question, this. Let’s get the question of delivery out of the way first: we’re using thinkific.com. The pic here is a screencapture of what that looks like in development.
However, with no offence to the team at thinkific – who have been great! – where you host it is the least of your worries. This blog post is about how we created it.
Video. Easy-peasy. We’re on Macs, so iMovie did the business. It’s not the best on the market but it’s exceptionally good for what it is. Most of the people who complain about it seem to me to have either
- decided to complain that it’s something it never tried to be
- never spent time learning how to use it.
I could be wrong! :)
Audio. Almost as easy. Garageband is great, but since Apple decided to remove podcasting functions it’s a tiny bit less great. Welcome back to Audacity. Really, I can’t imagine why anyone tries to do any audio work with out it. It’s powerful, it’s easy and it’s free. Oh, and it works on all operating systems. What’s not to love. Seriously!
An absolute no-brainer. Just occasionally we recorded in Audacity and then did the fancy tweaking Garagband, just for fun.
Fancy video. I’m a bit of a fan of canuck Steve Dotto and his training. If you don’t know him, do a quick search and watch his work. The screen-in-screen stuff is great to watch as you see him as he does his thing – it’s not just a voice-over of the screen. He does this using screenflow. The principle is simple – you can record both your screen and yourself at the same time, so it’s particularly suited for doing a running commentary of what’s on your screen, and seeing someone’s face is so much more engaging than just watching their screen.
It’s an absolute no-brainer of a piece of software. The only hard part was finding a shade of green material that worked as green-screen so we can edit out the background of the office!
By the way, to save you time, it uploads by magic to vimeo, which is where our videos are stored. From memory, it’s only about £80 – but there’s quite a steep learning curve, despite all the fantastic training/support: once you’ve got the the hang of it, though, you’re good to go!
Mac only, this one… sorry you Windows folks.
Movies. We did these a few ways. Both Keynote and quickbooks allow you to record your voice over the visuals. A quick export to .mov file format and you’re good to go. PowerPoint allows you to do the same in Windows, of course.
Timesaving tip – automatically upload to vimeo without spending time rendering/exporting first.
Video and audio hosting. That vimeo and soundcloud, respectively. We decided on vimeo (and not a free option) because it’s got better functionality and control that YouTube – and it’s just all round “cleaner”.
Why didn’t we host our videos and things with the rest of our site? Well in the first instance it was because our original hosts the cute-but-damaged FreshMember charged extra for hosting. It turned out to be a good thing, in the end, as when we migrated from cute-but-damaged Freshmember there was less fuss as the big files were stored somewhere else – the training simply embeds them, elegantly.
And that’s it? Yes. Obviously there were dozens of programs we used ‘in passing’ to do things like screen grabs or draft documents (grab and pages, exporting to PDF) but there’s nothing particularly special about these so I’ve not bothered mentioning them.
Have fun!
