Importing From Camtasia

[grembert1]

I am a new developer to the Captivate 4 community.  My first challenge in putting together an eLearning solution is to import screen capture material from Camtasia.  The submitting source only know Camtasia and refuses to use Captivate 4 because there is no interface for a MAC environment.  What format should he export and what format should I use to import.  Thank you in advance for any answers.

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking here.

Is it:

A: You are using Camtasia, and you want to know how to take the Captivate output and use it in Camtasia.

B: You used Camtasia to create a video and now want to know how you can use that in Captivate.

Cheers... Rick

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

[grembert1]

Rick, Thanks for the quick response on my post. In answer to your questions, the answer is both. We are doing a course in advanced Illustrator where the instructor demonstrates the various aspects of the lesson. He is a diehard MAC user and wants to do the screen capture in Camtasia because they have an interface to the MAC platform. I want to stay with Captivate 4 because of integration with all of Adobe and consistency with the projects I am generating. So, the question revolves around how can I use his output in my format?

<gr

[Captiv8r]

Ahhh okay, gotcha!

With Camtasia, you will want him to create a Flash based output. He will create either a .SWF or a .FLV file. You will then use the Insert > Animation (if SWF format) or Insert > Flash Video (if FLV format) to get the Camtasia output into Captivate.

I'm not sure about this next bit as the Camtasia rendering process may change the playing field a bit. But when he records, in the Camtasia recording settings, ensure he configures the Camtasia frame rate to 30 frames per second. That's the default frame rate for Captivate.

Cheers... Rick

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

[grembert1]

You are a blessing. Not only does this solve a technical issue but a political one as well, thank you.

<gr

[www_cpguru_com]

A quick word of caution. You can't be sure that Camtasia SWFs will work flawlessly when imported into Captivate. If you use the Camtasia navigation and controls then it will almost certainly not work.

In order to get the Camtasia SWFs to work in your Captivate project you will almost certainly need to create a loader widget in Flash to load these animations into Captivate at run-time.

I just tested this for another user and if I imported the Camtasia animation into Captivate directly it didn't work. However if I used a widget to load in the Camtasia animation then it worked just fine.

/Michael

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Visit my Captivate blog with tips & tricks, tutorials and Widgets.

[grembert1]

Thank you for your comments. One question though. At the bottom of the email you made a reference to a site that was advertising a "domain lock widget". What's the connection between that and my issue? Is this how the material should be imported into Captivate?

<gr

[www_cpguru_com]

Hi Grembert,

No the reference in my posting is simply a link to my web page about Captivate ;o) The DomainLock widget has nothing at all to do with it.

In order to get the Camtasia files to work properly you need to create a loader in Flash and insert that into Captivate. The function of the loader will be to load in the Camtasia SWF at run-time when Captivate reaches the particular slide.

The problem that will occur with Camtasia files inserted into Captivate is similar to the problem described in these two threads:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2423691#2423691

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/515052?tstart=0

/Michael

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Visit my Captivate blog with tips & tricks, tutorials and Widgets.

[grembert1]

I need a conformation here, Michael. It seems to me that the import of Camtasia files does not get absorbed into the Captivate 4 presentation, but resides outside the CP presentation and is called into the presentation at a point where it is needed. If this is the case, this somewhat defeats my end gold of a pure CP presentation. It also complicates configuration management of the presentation. I hope my interpretation is not correct.

<gr

[www_cpguru_com]

All I can say is that I just did a test for another Captivate user. He wanted to insert Camtasia files into a Captivate project same as you want. You can see his description of the problems in the last comments here: : http://www.cpguru.com/2009/11/17/as2-loader-widget-for-adobe-captivate-4/

So.. You will with 95% certainty not be able to insert the Camtasia files into Captivate as a regular animation and have Captivate "absorb" that into it's SWF and publish is as just one single SWF file.

You will be able to get it to work if you can live with the fact that you have one Captivate file that acts as a master project and then loads the Camtasia files on demand. If you publish to a web location or an LMS this will work fine and shouldn't be a problem. If you publish to EXE or CD then I have no idea if it will work.

I guess that the best thing you can do is to have your guy send you some test files created in Camtasia and then import that into Captivate and see what happens.

/Michael

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Visit my Captivate blog with tips & tricks, tutorials and Widgets.

[grembert1]

I think that says it all and your suggestion of running a few tests is appropriate. Thanks for all the hand holding here.

<gr

[Hamlet615]

I inserted a SWF file (generated in Camtasia 7.1 by another tech writer) in a Captivate 5 project. The SWF (from Camtasia) doesn't have any nagivation or controls. It's just a recorded event of mouse movements clicking this or that button on an application. I inserted this SWF as an animation on a blank slide in Captivate 5, and so far it's working well.

However, when I inserted the SWF into Captivate 5, I did get a dialog box indicating that the SWF (from Camtasia) was based on ActionScript 2 and that Captivate 5 uses ActionScript 3, which could lead to some unstable performance. But I went ahead and published the output (exported to HTML and set to Flashplayer 10). Again, the published output from Captivate 5 doesn't have any playback problems. It's just a seamless playback.

In Captivate 5's Publish dialog box, I noticed that the ActionScript setting was defaulted to version 3 (can this even be changed to version 2?). So the entire project got published in ActionScript 3. But, in the long run, will the different ActionScripts cause problems for other users?

[Lilybiri]

Captivate 5 is AS3 only.

Lilybiri