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Yvonne5EEF
Participant
September 23, 2020
Question

Convert Flash project to HTML5

  • September 23, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 553 views

I have been tasked with converting a .cp project done by a contractor in 2009 over to an HTML5 compliant project so I can republish the SCORM package for uploading to Moodle. I am an office admin NOT an elearning developer but I do have some technical background.

 

I managed to convert the .cp to.cptx but when I republished to HTML5 format, the publish failed (notification said exactly that) and I couldn't find any index.html file in the published folder. Looking through the HTML Tracker, I can see that pretty much every slide has some kind of incompatible content. There are 100+ slides. The vast majority of the incompatible animations are rollover captions. The rest of them say "Text Animation Only - Image is supported". They look like interactive buttons of some kind.

 

Is there any way at all to convert these unsupported animations without having to go slide by slide and recreate in HTML5, which we do not have the time to do right now? I'm told the animations are essential to the presentation and cannot be deleted. The presentation is supposed to be learner-paced so the ability for them to use the rollovers and buttons is essential.

 

I also can't do a recording and change the animations as that would also be too labour intensive.

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    2 replies

    RodWard
    Community Expert
    RodWardCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    September 24, 2020

    Rollover captions and rollover image objects are not technically incompatible with HTML5.  They simply aren't going to be any use on touch screen devices, that's why they are being flagged in the HTML5 Compatibility Checker.  However if all of your users will be on desktop or laptop PCs with mouse or touchpad as an option then you can leave the rollover objects in there.

     

    As for the other things that were flagged, the bad news is that you WILL need to remove/replace any components that are SWF-based.  That includes Rollover Slidelets, Text Animation objects, SWF widgets, etc. 

     

    The buttons or interactive objects you mention are likely to be SWF.  If you right click on them and choose Find in Library from the context menu, it will show you the SWF object listed in the Library if it is in fact Flash-based.  You should be easily able to replace any Flash buttons with other button types available in Captivate nowadays.  Smart Shape buttons would be the preferred type because they can be added in more flexible ways than the standard Text, Transparent, or Image buttons.

     

    Either way though, converting over to HTML5 can be a very time-consuming job.  Your organisation should have started this project a long time ago.  The retirement of SWF content by the end of 2020 has been known and advertised everywhere on the internet for several years now.  They are paying for their decision to put off the inevitable.

    https://infosemantics.com.au/how-to-convert-adobe-captivate-swf-courses-to-html5/

     

    Lilybiri
    Lilybiri
    Legend
    September 23, 2020

    I'm sorry for the bad news. This is exactly what I expected not only with the conversion but also from such old projects. The animations are probably all SWF-based, maybe even created with the older version of AS which is not supported since the extension changed to cptx.

    The only way I see is to capture the animations with the Video Demo feature of Captivate. Publish them to mp4 and insert the video as slide video. I don't know if the animations are synchronized with CP's timeline, and if there was interaction between CP and the animation (which was possible with AS). That would be lost, mp4 is not interactive. 

    For Rollovers: if the learners are using Desktop or Laptop, you can use Rollover Captions and Rollover Images. However they will not appear on tablets nor phones. The Rollover slide however cannot be used. It is a 'bug' in the HTML tracker. Probably because the CP team suppose that everyone is now creating responsive projects.

     

    If you need it working on tablets/phones, here is the quickest way to replace Rollovers by Click/Reveal interaction:

    http://blog.lilybiri.com/click-slash-reveal-interactions-back-to-basics

     

    Buttons have changed a lot, have no idea which type of buttons you have at this moment. 

    Bit late to start such a conversion, but I bet there are many more companies panicking. Personally I have not published to SWF since over 3 years. 

     

    Here are some more resources:

    http://blog.lilybiri.com/using-cpquizinfoanswerchoice-for-survey-conversion-from-swf-to-html

    It lists up the situations you can end up with after taking the included survey. Was meant as intro to this presentation (which finally was presented only by Allen, I was switched to another topic):

    https://elearning.adobe.com/2020/06/learn-how-to-convert-flash-into-html5-content/

     

    As Rod points out, this is very late to start such a conversion. EOL of Flash Player was announced over 3 years ago. Captivate team does offer HTML publishing since about 6 years.

     

     

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