Embedded Captivate animations not showing through Presenter

Hi Jim,

Not only is the problem still current (meaning that there is no specified solution), but, as others have suggested, the only real way that you can incorporate your Full Motion Recordings into Presenter content is to take the associated files (everything marked as "_Fullmotion#.swf") and drop them into the resources directory within the the data folder of a published Presentation file.

I hear your concern regarding the publishing process whereby you push all of your content to the Connect server. Having said that, let me now apologize for what will be a long post, but there may be alternative approaches to the problem reported here.

In fact, there ARE two other possibilities, but if you don't mind, I need to ask a question first: Is it possible for you to publish locally? IF so, then you could easily drop the FMR files into the resources directory...and immediately following that process, simply zip up the course and ftp that to the Connect server for deployment. This obviously assumes that you have permissions to do so at every level, including locally on your computer.

The second option, although not exactly the cleanest solution known to mankind, does provide a hack to published Captivate files. Here's the gist:

After you recorded your first session where you have a bunch of FMR's, what you might want to do is save a copy of the original Captivate project. Why? Because in this saved version, what you're going to do is completely eliminate any and all slides that contain full motion recordings. In their place, create new blank slides and from the Insert menu option in Captivate, trace down and select Animation. Then, search for and insert one of the FMR's that were generated when you published the first original project. It's basically the exact same process of inserting swfs when working in PowerPoint.

Once you have all the swfs loaded back into this copied project file, you can publish a single, contained, contiguous Captivate file that can be imported back in the PowerPoint environment.

Now here's where things get wierd....

After you've inserted the new Captivate project's swf file in PowerPoint and publish THAT file, what'll you end up with is a "flash" of white everytime the swf file begins to play each of the FMR's. Although it's only for a millisecond, it's visually annoying to watch. I've tried several different options in an attempt to kill that problem with varying degrees of failure. What I haven't tried yet is manually adjusting the timeline to see if I can overcome it, but I'll report any findings as soon as I have time to deal with it. In the meantime, however, another option I tried was to create a screen shot of the interface I recorded and convert that image into a background graphic for the entire duration of the Captivate movie. Rather than the "flashes of white" I saw before, this time the movie appeared to "cut" from one shot to another, which was less visually distracting than having to watch the "flashes of white" problem that I experienced previously.

Again, sorry for the long post, but thought I'd share what I've learned recently!

HTH,

Rob

visit my new Presenter forum at:
http://www.robrode.com/yabb/

Hi JimW and welcome to our community

Unfortunately Captivate 3 changed the playing field when it comes to output. Captivate 2 allowed selecting between Flash player versions 6, 7 and 8. If you selected version 6, your full motion clips were stored inside the resulting Captivate SWF. But if you targeted player versions 7 or 8, they were left outside and called when needed.

Captivate version 3 only offers publishing for Flash player 7, 8 or 9. So there is no way now to ensure the full motion clips are stored inside a single .SWF. Only the .EXE output will now create a single file to distribute.

So what are your options?

1. Definitely make the development team aware of the situation by filing a Bug Report/Feature Request. You may easily do this by clicking here and completing the form.

2. Sorry, but your only real option here is to ensure you manually copy the other .SWF content to the location where you need it.

Perhaps some bright soul will discover a cool workaround here and share it. But unless that happens, I think the manual copy is about your best bet. Wish I had better news to offer.

Cheers... Rick