How synchronize animated powerpoint objects in Captivate 5.5

Report · Jan 20, 2012

I'm testing Captivate 5.5 creating LMS content for our company. I have a powerpoint presentation with animations at some slides. This animations were triggered by mouse click, when I now bring in this powerpoint presentation to Captivate I have only one slide object but no animated objects. This means I can't ad a sound record and sychronize this sound file with the animated object. Have any one an idea how I can synchronize existing powerpoint objects with a soundfile?

Appreciate and help.

Thx

Mario

Report · Jan 20, 2012

Hello and welcome to the forum,

For this purpose I sincerely believe that Adobe Presenter is a better choice that Captivate. Indeed, Powerpoint slides are imported as one movie in Captivate. Captivate is not in the first place a PPT-plugin, animations are better done in Captivate if you want to synchronize. PPT-import is only one feature of Captivate, and IMO not really the most important. I'm telling this because of your sentence 'testing Captivate 5.5...'. If your elearning modules are really presentations like Powerpoint you'd better use a plug in (Adobe Presenter or other applications). Adding audio and synchronizing will then happen in Powerpoint. Or you can add the audio in PPT itself and import then in Captivate, which is in that case just used as a converter, and not really for what is meant to do.

Hope you'll understand my answer, I'm always frustrated when Captivate is tested based on a PPT-conversion whereas all its more important features are just ignored.

Lilybiri

Report · Jan 20, 2012

Hi Lilybiri,

Many Thanks for the quick response, I had the feeling you understand my question very well and therefore is your answer very helpfull for me. You are absolutly right when you mentioned all the Captivate features I think they are very helpful and important features. My idea was to combine a kind of "Articulate" and a kind of "simbuilder" and I was really impressed regarding the simulation feature package I find in Captivate. Maybe you can give a short answer about Adobe Presenter, is there a kind of "little" animation recording available?

Many Thanks

Mario

Report · Jan 20, 2012

Mario,

Thanks for not being 'insulted'. Captivate is a full authoring tool which I use for everything... but rarely for converting a PPT. I prefer creating my presentations in CP itself but I'm a freak.

The complete toolbox for me is the eLearning Suite, which has Presenter as well as Captivate (+ Photoshop, Flash, Audition, Dreamweaver, Acrobat). Answered about its functionalities and integration this morning (will look up the thread and post the link). And if I use a PPT and need to add software sims in the presentation I will use Presenter as plug in for the PPT, create the sims in Captivate and publish them as SWF and then insert them in a slide in the PPT. Or, for very large files, will combine them in a pdf-portfolio. Presenter has no possibility to create sims, but adding audio, video, animations and question slides are built in. Synchronizing with audio is even easier than in Captivate IMO.

Lilybiri

Report · Jan 23, 2012

Lilybiri wrote:
Mario,
Thanks for not being 'insulted'. Captivate is a full authoring tool which I use for everything... but rarely for converting a PPT. I prefer creating my presentations in CP itself but I'm a freak.

You're not a freak, I do the same. I tried converting once and it was so cumbersome and frustrating I gave up. About the only thing I use it for now is if someone has a powerpoint template they like I'll import the slide deck to get the back ground and everything, then create a master slide that mirrors the PPT, copy/paste the master slide into a new 'fresh' cptx. Not the smoothest workflow but it gives me much cleaner graphics and better control over the final product.

Report · Jul 04, 2012

If you want to convert PowerPoint presentations into SWF animations, you can use ISpring. It even has a free version that works surprisingly well! It installs as a plug-in to PowerPoint.

Report · Jan 21, 2012

I have this same problem. We have been using Presenter to create on-line courses from PPT presentations with custom animations on each slide. This has worked well, but we wanted to add the ability to send a student back to specific slide in a course if they failed to answer a quiz question correctly. We also wanted to be able to "drill down" - click on a highlighted word or phrase for more information if desired, then continue with the course. My management was told you could not do either of these with Presenter, but could with Captivate. It looks to me like you can do the former with Presenter but maybe not the latter. Is this correct? Which would be the better to work with to do custom animations (text, figures, motion) synchronized with audio, drill down, and send students back for review?

Report · Jan 21, 2012

Use Captivate, but do not create the animations in Powerpoint, but in Captivate.

Lilybiri

Report · Jan 21, 2012

The animations are on the PPT slides - text appearing as it is spoken, parts of sketches on the slide appearing as it is talked about, etc. So are you saying I can create the presentation slides themselves within Captivate and animate there, not using PPT at all?