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Gabriel Harper
New Participant
January 21, 2019
Answered

Captivate 2019 Custom Assets / Bridge

  • January 21, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 556 views

Long-time Creative Cloud and Adobe product user here. I love CC and the extremely high bar Adobe usually sets. A significant bit of my professional work is in B2B eLearning - specifically using Storyline 2 & Storyline 360.

I'm coming back to "trial" Captivate 2019 as many of the features are attractive - in particular, responsive courses w/ breakpoints and more advanced programming.

I very quickly discovered that the media/asset tools in Captivate fall way short. I'm hoping that I'm missing something here and those of you familiar with the platform can enlighten me.

  1. Assets provides no ability to manage or browse media/assets of my own?
  2. What is this eLearning Brothers spam, and why is it integrated in a piece of commercial software?
  3. There is no Bridge integration?
  4. The only way to add images or media of my own is to place them using the standard File Explorer?
  5. The Adobe Stock tab just shows an iFrame of Adobe Stock website?

Please, somebody tell me I'm missing something!! How do you manage your assets and use your own media in a project? Did Captivate 2019 just completely drop the ball on this?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Lilybiri

Hmm.... does SL has a goo d media manager? First reason I never wanted to use it was the lack of Project Libraries. Have a look at:

Internal and External Libraries - Captivate blog

Years ago Bridge was always open on my system, (have been teaching PS for 20 years). In older versions of CP there was integration with Bridge. But as you know perhaps Adobe CC teams are looking down on Captivate which is 'in another business unit' and they have killed a lot of collaboration between CC apps and Captivate. Bridge also got out of focus in recent years in favor of Lightroom. Now it has been taken up again, maybe the integration in Captivate (Place in Captivate existe) will get back? I don't care that much, I woud much rather have the inttegration of CC Libraries in Captivate. It exists in  the mobile app Captivate Draft. That may be a first workaround: import the media you want in Draft and transfer to the dektop Captivate application.

I don't use that workflow myself. I import all media which I need into the Library of a project, use external Libraries to import often used media and shared actions.  You may also miss the possibility to import a navite Photoshop File and have complete roundtripping with the source file. Imported PSD will be as a separate folder in the Library, and the layers you choose to import will be converted to png-images. Perfectt roundtripping.

You can also use the Edit with fucntionality to roundtrip with Audition for audio assets, and with Illustrator for SVG's. Phonegap and Typekit are integrated. There used to be roundtripping with Flash, now Animate CC but since CP still needs to publish to both SWF and HTML5, that is not so interesting anymore. Maybe after the death of Flas player? ,

You don't need to use the eLearning Brothers assets, I never do except occasionally for a character. Just ignore them.

I do use Adobe Stock (the images in the blog about Libraries are Stock images). Nut I never use them directly in Captivate, because I always have to edit, sometimes only for the file size.  I put them in CC Library and edit in Photoshop, often several Stock images in one PS file, which I can import into Captivate as a source file.

BTW: maybe not so visible but CP ha Rulers and Guides like PS, ID and AI. 

1 reply

Lilybiri
LilybiriCorrect answer
Brainiac
January 21, 2019

Hmm.... does SL has a goo d media manager? First reason I never wanted to use it was the lack of Project Libraries. Have a look at:

Internal and External Libraries - Captivate blog

Years ago Bridge was always open on my system, (have been teaching PS for 20 years). In older versions of CP there was integration with Bridge. But as you know perhaps Adobe CC teams are looking down on Captivate which is 'in another business unit' and they have killed a lot of collaboration between CC apps and Captivate. Bridge also got out of focus in recent years in favor of Lightroom. Now it has been taken up again, maybe the integration in Captivate (Place in Captivate existe) will get back? I don't care that much, I woud much rather have the inttegration of CC Libraries in Captivate. It exists in  the mobile app Captivate Draft. That may be a first workaround: import the media you want in Draft and transfer to the dektop Captivate application.

I don't use that workflow myself. I import all media which I need into the Library of a project, use external Libraries to import often used media and shared actions.  You may also miss the possibility to import a navite Photoshop File and have complete roundtripping with the source file. Imported PSD will be as a separate folder in the Library, and the layers you choose to import will be converted to png-images. Perfectt roundtripping.

You can also use the Edit with fucntionality to roundtrip with Audition for audio assets, and with Illustrator for SVG's. Phonegap and Typekit are integrated. There used to be roundtripping with Flash, now Animate CC but since CP still needs to publish to both SWF and HTML5, that is not so interesting anymore. Maybe after the death of Flas player? ,

You don't need to use the eLearning Brothers assets, I never do except occasionally for a character. Just ignore them.

I do use Adobe Stock (the images in the blog about Libraries are Stock images). Nut I never use them directly in Captivate, because I always have to edit, sometimes only for the file size.  I put them in CC Library and edit in Photoshop, often several Stock images in one PS file, which I can import into Captivate as a source file.

BTW: maybe not so visible but CP ha Rulers and Guides like PS, ID and AI. 

    G
    Gabriel HarperAuthor
    New Participant
    January 21, 2019

    Thank you so much for the in-depth response! I was actually just reading something on your blog yesterday in my research.

    It's becoming clear that Libraries are the meat-and-potatoes I'm looking for, but I probably shouldn't expect much in the way of built-in resources.

    Storyline 360 is a bit of the opposite. There's a tremendous library of built-in assets (characters, illustrations, icons, tons of royalty-free stock photos, templates, etc.), but nothing quite like Libraries. The quality is very high - much more so than all of the free resources I'm finding for Captivate, which often feel like they were borrowed directly from 1994 This is a huge point for one of the teams I work with and is sorely missed in Captivate - but that's neither here nor there.

    I've since discovered the workflow with Draft and glad to at least have that available.

    After experimenting with guides last night I found object snapping to be a bit weird (eg lining up a text box wasn't snapping at all), but again I'm just getting the feel for Captivate and there is probably more to that.

    After playing with Libraries a bit I'm feeling a lot better about asset management, although far from a perfect world (when is it ever?!) it offers a lot I don't find with Storyline.

    Captivate seems to have so much potential, but not quite up to the same level as CC apps that I expect, so I had a pretty high bar set going into it with 2019. I feel like Assets section is a huge miss. That said, it also seems to offer a lot of advanced functionality that I'm desperately missing in Storyline, so I'm eager and excited to explore further.

    Fingers crossed Adobe will take Captivate seriously moving forward so the eLearning industry can truly benefit.

    Lilybiri
    Lilybiri
    Brainiac
    January 21, 2019

    Great! Captivate is an amazing application, but most users think they'll master it in one hour! I am usgin it daily since 10 years, and still discover once in a while something new.. Combined with CC and sme JS, its functionality is much less limited than other eLearning authoring tools. I don't care so much about tons of assets myself; Functionality, reusability, flexibilty are so much more important?

    Good luck!

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