Getting AVI files from Captivate 5

[Sowmya Vivek]

I have several lessons created in captivate 4 and 5 that I want as an AVI file as final output file. When I publish from Captivate 5 as F4v file, what is the best way of converting it to an avi file?

[S_Ayyappan]

Hi Sowmya,

What is the usecase for requiring an AVI file (you can publish a fixed frame rate F4V to youtube and other video hosting sites). Understanding this might help us in providing you alternatives.

Thanks,

Shameer

[Sowmya Vivek]

Hi Ayyappan

We have a virtual classroom type of an application in which each of the lessons is activated by a menu. The lesson then has to be play full screen irrespective of the size of the monitor. Our programmers feel it will be easier for them to handle this if they had a *.avi file.

ThanxSowmya

[Sony]

F4V files also can be played in full screen (video will be stretched to fit the screen). I use GOM player (GOMlab.com) to play it this way. You need to associate (in windows explorer) f4v extension to GOM player and then it works.

Captivate 5 when installed, you get Adobe Media Encoder(AME) also along with it. Using this you can convert F4V to MP4 (or 3GP) etc. You need to select H.264 option and then select the file format (extension .mp4, .3gp etc). Will this serve your needs ?

But you cannot convert this to AVI using AME. There are other tools which can do this conversion, but it not advised as AVI was not designed for H.264 video (high compression).

-Sony

[Christopher at Adobe]

What is the usecase for requiring an AVI file (you can publish a fixed frame rate F4V to youtube and other video hosting sites). Understanding this might help us in providing you alternatives.

Hi Shameer,

Often the output in Captivate needs to be repurposed as part of a larger presentation. For that I would want to import the capture into my Premiere or After Effects workflow. F4V (and other MP4 formats) are lossy, so you introduce compression artifacts. In the past, I believe I was able to export Captivate files to a lossless AVI file and reimport into my editing application with no quality loss.

My final output might be F4V, however often my final export is not coming from Captivate.

Does that make sense?

Thanks,

Christopher

[Sony]

Hi Christopher,

I understand your editing needs.

Even the AVI files produced by Captivate 4 was lossy (this but again depends on the codecs which you select).

In  Captivate 5, you cannot select codecs, but it always gives out f4v (which is H.264 - yes definitely lossy).

Did you really try editing this in Premiere or After effects ? Since the decoding is done just once in these tools and later on all editing on these decoded frames, you might not get a lot of artifacts. Usually artifacts come in when you do this (decode, edit, encode) sequence multiple times.

Please checkout and let us know.

Thanks,

Sony

[clegg100]

I am not impressed with the loss of the AVI export feature in Captivate 5. It was a useful feature in 4.

I wanted to include some screen captures as part of a video I was producing but could not import FLV directly into my video editing package. Also, as it has already been pointed out FLV is a compressed format.

What Sony has said about AVI is not strictly true. There are free lossless AVI codecs, such as the Lagarith Lossless Video Codec, which allow you to export to AVI without losing quality. When producing videos you always want to work with the best quality video and if you have to save from Captivate to FLV and then re-encode to another format, before using a file in an editing package, you will lose a lot of quality.

Also, the lack of options for the FLV output is a problem. With the AVI option you could export to a lossless format and then encode to FLV using the software of your choice. Doing it that way would allow me to have complete control over bit rate and other settings which are important to the quality and deployment of a FLV file.

I though Captivate 5 would add features rather than taking them away.

[Derek Punaro]

This is a problem for me, too.  I want to store Captivate videos in our enterprise video solution, which transcodes the files from a non-Flash format to FLV.  That process also adds bumpers to the beginning and end, and it won't transcode FLV to FLV.  We were publishing as AVI and letting the transcoder do the work of converting and standardizing the videos for us.

[captivatevillian]

Create the output as .f4v video and then rename it to m4v. I used this method to upload to slideshare and I would imagine it would work for other type sites.

It also allows you to view the file in QuickTime or Windows Media Player.

[Christopher at Adobe]

Create the output as .f4v video

As noted above, .f4v is a lossy format, and while fine for playback, is not suitable for editing after the fact.

[JShowersi360]

I agree.  I've been fighting w/ Adobe on this very issue.

[Guest]

Hi folks,

Just a thought here . Have you thought of converting the published Captivate F4V file to AVI format using Adobe Media Encoder CS5 which ships with Adobe Captivate 5?

Best regards,

Mark

[Sony]

Just one clarification here.

The flavour of AME (Adobe Media Encoder), which gets installed with Captivate 5 as well as eLS doesnt have support for AVI export (though we are trying to add this in the future versions).

If you have installed AME as part of Adobe Premiere, then you would however get these options.

-Sony

[Guest]

Hi Sony,

Thanks for the heads up. I must of installed eLS 2 after I had installed Master Collection CS5 which I why I can see Microsoft AVI in my AME format menu. Hope you can make the AVI option available to CP and eLS 2 AME soon.

Sorry everyone for any confusion.

Best regards,

Mark

[JShowersi360]

What is eLS2?  Would I get avi support if I installed it? As you know I can't convert to AVI with Adobe Media Encoder.  The MP4 encoding doesn't convert Captivate's F4V files to MP4 very well at all. In fact they're pretty much unusable.

[Lilybiri]

Hello,

eLS2 is the eLearning Suite 2.

Lilybiri

[JShowersi360]

I still haven't figured how to get AVI support from Captivate CS5. And, as mentioned before, Adobe's Media Encoder (which ships with CS5) doesn't make very good MP4s either.

However, here's a solution that can only be called "red neck engineering," but it works if an average quality MP4 will help you get by. And it involves YouTube.com (yes, that youtube).

1. Create a YouTube account if you don't already have one
2. Create your F4V file from Adobe Captivate.
3. Upload your F4V to YouTube
   
   - YouTube creates an MP4 for you! -
   
   
4. Go to the My Videos Link
   
   
   
5. Then download the MP4 and use is as needed. 
   
   
   Works way better than Adobe's Media Encoder that ships with CS5 (at least for converting F4Vs created by Captivate - I haven't tried to convert anything else).  Kinda sad, but true.
   
   
6. You can delete the videos, or make them private, if you don't want them to be seen publicly.

For what it's worth.

Ron in Columbus, Oh.

[Guest]

Just want to add in that I too would love to have a way to publish to a lossless avi so I could import it into Adobe After Effects at the best quality possible and then let me pick and choose my codec and compression settings for my final output.

Right now I am using AVS Video Converter software to convert my videos to the formats i need.

Just throwing this out there hoping that every voice counts and this will be implemented in a future update or (heavy sigh) version.

[Captiv8r]

Hi Marc

MarcBosscher wrote:

...Just throwing this out there hoping that every voice counts and this will be implemented in a future update or (heavy sigh) version.

Unfortunately, posts here don't count for that. Sure, they give folks a nice warm fuzzy feeling as if they have had their say. After all, this *IS* an Adobe sanctioned forum, right? And we do see Adobe Captivate developers participating here, no?

The thing is, folks that wish to see features emerge really need to consider submitting the features via the Wish Form. This is because the contents of these forms is stored in a database and it becomes like a voting system. As you might imagine, the more votes for a particular feature, the more likely it will be to see the feature emerge.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links Captivate Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Adobe Certified Captivate Training SorcerStone Blog Captivate eBooks

[Guest]

I know, Rick and I have submitted it.  Just figured the more venue's I make my wish made the better off.   Oh and it was nice to find a bunch of other developers who wanted the same thing.

[Guest]

Hi Folks,

I, as well, wrestled with this for many many hours, even days.  I had seen that many were struggling with this, so I dug around and found something that works, at least it worked for me.  I came across a free product called Format Factory, located at http://www.formatoz.com/.  This application converts multimedia files to different formats.  It seems like a terrific program, especially for free.  I published my Captivate 5 project to the F4V format.  Then I opened Format Factory, and converted the file to AVI.

One thing that befuddled me a bit was the size (dimensions) of the project.  The original FLV project I needed to convert was 1272x980 pixels.  When publishing to F4V, a dialog instructs you to resize the project to 1072x768.  So, at first, when I did this at Modify > Rescale Project, I used the default option - "Rescale Project to Fit New Size."  When the project is resized, it becomes distorted, at any point in the project screen where there's a mouse click.  After some time I realized it's better to crop the project to the new dimensions.  Fortunately, the graphics and mouse movements were still within the new frame dimensions.  I only had to rearrange some callouts so that they would fit within the new dimensions.

Then I cropped the project to 1072x768, published it to the F4V format, opened Format Factory, and formatted the F4V file into AVI.

I hope this is some help to some folks.

All the best,

DAVId

[Geo F]

Just happened upon this thread, looking for similar information about file types from Captivate.

That is pretty disappointing, and surprising, that it doesn't offer AVI. Yes, I see there are workarounds and possibly other solutions in applications. But in this day and age, with a file format so common, why NOT output to AVI? Sheesh.

[joebor1776]

We have Captivate 5.0 videos with audio. Have tried outputting to F4V, and upon upload to You Tube, the frame rate is messed up. So we tried the F4V Fixed Frame Rate output option. But this option results in the audio stuttering and cutting out. Can anyone recommend a decent free conversion program that can take a SWF and convert it to MP4 or MOV?

BTW, I know that Captivate 5.5 has the MP4 output option, and I've tried the 30-day trial and it works great--we just can't upgrade at the moment.

Thanks!

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

Have you tried using Adobe Media Encoder?

Click here to view

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links Captivate Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Adobe Certified Captivate Training SorcerStone Blog Captivate eBooks

[joebor1776]

Hi Rick,

Thanks, yes I have used the Adobe Media Encoder. But this problem occurs before that point. Just outputting as F4V with Fixed Frame Rate results in a lot of audio problems (those problems just get rolled forward when you run it through the media encoder). So I need to convert from the SWF. As far as I know, the media encoder can't convert from a swf, correct?