Is there an alternative method

Report · Sep 08, 2015

Hello All:

My journey with Adobe product line started with the need to create e-learning content. I have 10 days - 120 Hrs of experience with Adobe products (Creative Cloud and Captivate put together). I also have some very rich presentations that I wish to convert in to responsive e-learning courses.

Import from Powerpoint in to captivate is definitely not the way to go as there is no responsive element to it. Considering that I do not want to give up on the richness of these presentations and I also want the courses to be responsive, I found out a way to do it with perfection however I am sure there will be a better and easier way.

PROCESS

1. Save the presentation in an emf format

2. Open it in Adobe Illustrator and separate each visual block as a separate entity and save it as an SVG. This process has to be repeated for all the visuals in a slide and for all slides in the presentation.

3. Open Captivate and import these files one by one for each slide. On an average I have 10 SVG files per slide that have to be imported in to Captivate

4. Design the course as a responsive course in Captivate

BENEFITS

1. All the graphics are highly responsive in nature as they are SVG and do not lose their richness when scaled

2. They can be individually placed anywhere on the slide and breakpoints as needed

3. All fonts can be used as they are converted to curves (No restriction of web fonts or no worry about the font having to be there on the end user's computer)

CONS

1. Extremely time consuming

2. All modifications have to be done in Ai if text is also imported as curves

To top it all, I am also creating video courses for the same lectures using video demo recording in Captivate, editing in Premiere Pro, audio recording in Audacity and final touches in After Effects. I know this is an overkill 😉

In your opinion, is there a better way of doing the PPT stuff? The last piece regarding video courses, you may ignore. I put it in just for completeness to give a sense of what I am trying to achieve. The issue with my method is the time component rather than the complexity given that I am a perfection freak!

Regards,

Mangesh

Report · Sep 09, 2015

I never use PPT as a start for an eLearning course, it is and remains a presentation tool (a good one) and my idea of presentations is far away from my concept of eLearning. That must be my teacher's history. I always start eLearning courses from scratch for the reasons you detected about PPT-import. I use video demo sometimes, strongly believe that passive video is not the most engaging way to learn for students; I will embed them in interactive courses for those aspects that can only benefit from a video. The Captivate video editor is sufficient for those short videos. The problem with using Premiere Pro is that you cannot edit the raw cpvc-file, you have to publish to mp4 to edit which means quality loss. I am bit astonished that you don't use Audition instead of Audacity, since Captivate has a nice roundtripping feature with Audition. CP9 has roundtripping with Illustrator as well, besides the great way of using layers from a source Photoshop file.

SVG's are the way to go if you need responsive projects where the graphical assets remain crisp and detailed in each resolution. To keep text also as SVG seems indeed overkill, I use mostly the text engine of Captivate. I'm not sure if turning the background images to SVG has sense, maybe someone from the staff could confirm that.

I always import all assets to the Library, rarely directly to a slide. With good labeling dragging everything to slides works very quickly. You can also use assets from an external Library, a feature that few users are aware of. Often used assets, graphical, video, audio as well as shared actions are at your fingertip from an External Library.

Report · Sep 09, 2015

Thanks Lilybiri:

I do agree with you on the usage of PowerPoint however at times, you don't really have a choice especially when you want to leverage existing assets. With respect to Audition, yes I have just begun with Audition as well so in the next few days will make the switch.

With regards to editing in captivate; personally, I think Premiere Pro does a far better job and offers far more flexibility as well as control. Yes, there is a trade off if I use Captivate for video demos. I am also exploring other options like Camtasia Studio purely for that reason. The latter offers export in a loss-less format. I really wish Captivate had round-tripping with Premier Pro as well just like Audition.

From your points above, I take it that this is the only method to achieve what I wish to And btw, just wanted to mention that you have a wonderful blog. Quite informative; I have learned a few things from you Thanks for that.

Regards,

Mangesh

Report · Sep 09, 2015

Thanks for your comment about my blog, busy now with a cookbook for advanced/shared actions.

Camtasia is a great tool for video, I don't use it anymore because of my ideas about video, video demo has enough features. I have been begging myself to have roundtripping cpvc with Premiere Pro but no one else seems to enter such a feature request.

Indeed, except my tip about library, and my doubts about SVG as background image, I couldn't offer you a lot.

BTW: add Edge Animate to your toolkit as well