Skip to main content
R
richardELeach
Inspiring
March 11, 2010
Question

Captivate vs. Director.... anyone know?

  • March 11, 2010
  • 2 replies
  • 1830 views

Hi-

I've recently downloaded Captivate 4 and succesfully prototyped a few presentations that look, work and behave nicely. The only problem is that I'm on a Mac and Captivate 4 is only available for Windows. MANY moons ago I actually worked with Director (even before Adobe got the product, anyone remember Macromind???)

My questions are:

Does anyone know enough about the 2 products (Captivate 4 and Director 11.5) that can speak to whether or not Director can do all of the major presentation functionality that Captivate currently offers? (We're not much into the quizzes and testing pieces)

I went down the Flash route and for what I need to do (bang out 1-3 small (5-10 slide) presentations per day that are voice narrated, synchronized with some basic transitions and video) Flash was overkill, at least when compared to Captivate. The main thing was the timeline metaphor; Flash and all of its Actionscript was simply too much, where Captivate fit nicely with a much more simplified mouse click/properties panel and did what I needed it to do.

Is Director closer to Flash in the way you actually build presentations? Do I need to be an Actionscript/Lingo guru? And I'm assuming I can export my presos from Director to swf format; I definitely do not want my viewers to have to download another plug in to view my presos.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Rich

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    A
    Anonymous
    March 11, 2010

    I have worked with the three tools but mostly with Flash and Captivate.

    If you can live with the fact that Captivate only runs on Windows, I think you'll be better off with Captivate. All the workflow in Captivate are meant to create eLearning content. It's fairly easy to add audio without any scripting in Captivate but flash and Director require a little bit of coding. If you're not a Director or Flash guru, I would definitely go with Captivate. Also put in the balance that Captivate offers packaging mechanisms to publish to LMS and other formats.

    Yves

    R
    richardELeachAuthor
    Inspiring
    March 11, 2010

    Thanks everybody, sounds like I'll stick with Captivate for now, and hope that the Mac version makes it in time for the CS5 release.

    Rich

    Lilybiri
    Lilybiri
    Legend
    March 11, 2010

    Hello,

    I cannot help you really for the comparison between Captivate and Director at all, although I believe they are in a different category. Director is to me typically standalone app, Captivate works happily together with other applications in p.e. the eLearning suite or the Technical Communication suite.


    But something in your first alinea struck me. FYI: check out this blog article by RJ Jacquez:

    http://blogs.adobe.com/rjacquez/2009/11/a_sneak_peek_of_adobe_captivat.html

    Lilybir

    R
    richardELeachAuthor
    Inspiring
    March 11, 2010

    Hi Lilybir-

    Yes, Captivate will be available for the Mac, supposedly when Adobe rolls out CS5. I am actually a beta tester, and they have a ways to go....

    I'm actually viewing some online content for Director and so far the timeline metaphor looks similar to that of Captivate, but in my mind Director and Flash have always overlapped each other (Flash's "swf" used to really mean "Shockwave File" a long time ago, then when Flash became more popular than Director Adobe (or Macromedia?) made the switch....

    I'll keep looking, and thanks for your response.

    Rich

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices