Using modular captivate films

Dear jbradley and Larry

thank you very much for your responses.

I have not considered "go back"-functions for my work, because that would mean that I would have to manage and publish 30 or more files for each lesson. The complexity required in this project is already a challenge, thats why I try to keep it simple and structured.

Larry, you are right - branching IS the key. It is just that I need to branch from several lessen (i call them main process) into separate films (sidetracks or subprocess). With lots of editing required throughout the project and dozens of subprocesses in lots of main lessons, branching by copy-and-paste would blow up file size and require meticulous tracking of changes in the various places, I inserted a subprocess.

So, the solution, I am now going for, is a slightly different one.
A Flash-developer is now about to build an object for me, which I insert into the respective frame. This object is transparent and will only start when a button is clicked.
It then stops the main film and plays a separate subfilm, which refers to a flashfile, I only have to build once.
Call it "advanced branching" if you want.. ;-)

Lets see, how this works out.

I am not a developer, so I just try to keep things going with the lectures - my main tasks are in customizing our new software.

So far, the feedback from my initial flash-lectures yielded excellent feedback in our project steering commitee and with a bit of luck, this might make a nice success-story in ourt company.

best regards
Boris

Boris, I know you said you don't want to involve scenarios and branching, but because of the context, I am not sure that you are using those terms the same way I would. If you have Captivate 3 (only) you can, in fact, set up very complex branching scenarios through the use of slide-grouping.

That would seem to be a natural solution for your wishes, and I am not sure you know about it and are saying you don't want to use that method, or if you are using the terms "scenarios" and "branching" in a different context entirely.

If you are aware of slide grouping and complex branching in Captivate 3, forgive me for wasting your time. If not, you might want to explore it.

Have a nice day!
.

Assuming you're chunking your materials, you can use Javascript to do some crude "go back to where you were" navigation.

Basically, you can do an Execute Javascript call of:

window.history.go(-1);

and it will reload the previous movie, whatever that happened to be.

However, Captivate doesn't offer a way to easily jump to a particular slide in a movie, so the best you can hope for with this method is to restart the previous section from the beginning.

Boris,

I am currently working on a project that has similar requirements for linking to different topics. It also uses audio narration and some fullmotion sections and so filesize is a concern of mine. The projects are published as SWF with HTML wrappers. I opted to carve up the larger sequence into smaller chunks and use buttons and the menu to link to the HTML wrapper to open in the current window. So, it doesn't use any built-in branching feature but it seems to work for my purpose. Hope this is useful...

-Chris