Menu option and CC

Hi seattleu,

LOL! I am glad you understood my intent (above). I've bowed out of that part of the thread for fear of stirring things up by being misunderstood again.

Unfortunately, the closed captioning has to be placed on the slide (at slide level) and while it isn't a technically difficult procedure (as you have found), it is arduous and time consuming.

In his Essentials of Captivate - Skills and Drills Newsletter, Kevin Siegel suggests a shortcut to the procedure that he calls "round tripping" to move text from Captivate to MS Word, edit it, and return it to Captivate. I've adopted Kevin's round-tripping as my own default way of handling cc-text, and here it is - much simplified (sorry Kevin, but demands of space ...):

1) Open each slide with audio and insert any text in closed captioning ... this will be used as a place holder. The text might be as simple as "CC line 1 goes here". Edit: Where I said " insert any text", I meant to paste some standard phraseology ... because ... individually typing placeholder text would defeat the whole purpose of trying to speed up the "cc" entries ...

2) Use "File > Export > Project Captions and Closed Captions" to move default text into Word.

3) Edit in Word's two-column display, showing your placeholder text in one column and your edits in the other

4) In Captivate, use "File > Import > Project Captions and Closed Captions"

That will place the closed captioning back into Captivate, updated.

I've taken liberties with abbreviating Kevin's steps due to space. If you contact me with your email address, I'll be happy to send you the whole thing word-for-word. My email is "larry AT captivate-tips DOT com".
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Hi Larry. Thanks for the heads up about the file size when resizing the project. I honestly don't think I ever noticed. I'll try your suggestion.

jbradley88,

Please reread my comments. I said not once, but several times, that you are helpful in the community, even to the point of giving you the "expert" accolade. I did everything I could to point out that my caution applies to any "in person" meetings with any internet stranger. But nothing changes the fact that you are a "stranger", and that you did offer to meet a member who appears to be a young college-age female - to help her "privately".

If you can't get your mind around what might be wrong with that scenario, and why someone might want to warn against a meeting like that until research has been done, there is little help for you. Actually, you are just making my case for me stronger.

To correct some other misunderstandings:
1) I am self-employed and my time is given freely here also - it's not on an employer's nickel.

2) You seem to hold grudges - sad. But don't hold one against Macrofireball for not showing up in Seattle. He lives in the UK, I believe, so it's probably not a case of him refusing to cross the street to address your group. If he wasn't able to meet a prior commitment for an on-line meeting, I'm guessing there was a very good reason for it ... but your hostile attitude toward speakers who opt out or can't make it would certainly preclude me from ever accepting an invitation from your group. Actually, at one time I was one the list ...

3) The "CatBandit" screen name has been mine for years, but my real name (Larry Walther) is always in the signature line of every post I've placed in these forums. I've never hidden the fact that I live in DeWitt, Iowa, nor that I am 65 years old and male. My photo and biography is on the Adobe website not because I am an Adobe staffer (I am not) but because I earned the right to be called an Adobe certified instructor, and have been accepted by Adobe as a "Community Expert" as well.

4) I've always accorded you the utmost respect in the forums. Long ago I might have recommended you to Adobe as a "community expert" applicant, except that ... Tah Dah! ... I know nothing at all about you. But I have gone out of my way to give you a "attagirl" or "attaboy" (whatever) when appropriate. It really wouldn't hurt for you to return that respect, because - put simply - I've earned it. Or barring that, pay me the courtesy of reading my posts as they are intended, not as seen through the eyes of a paranoid.

And BTW, I have no desire to know anything about you - but you didn't offer to come to my house and personally help me out "over my shoulder". Had you, I would have known your shoe size, your favorite color, and which arm you pitch with before accepting an offer like that ... and I'm not young, or female.

I said nothing personal about you, jbradley88. What I did say specifically about you was entirely complimentary. I was commenting on a situation, not an individual. As a matter of fact, until your tirade, I respected you, so don't create a problem when there is none.
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Jeez Larry, take a breath and relax. I think you've been watching too many reruns of CHiPs.

The great majority of us don't have the need or desire to post our personal or professional information publicly, nor would we want to if that option were available. Unlike yourself, I (and likely many others) post here of my own accord and not as a representative of my employer, so I feel it would be inappropriate to include such information in a signature or profile. And I see no benefit in posting personal information on a public website, especially one trafficked by individuals named "CatBandit" and "Macrofireball" (sorry Mark, but you stood us up at the Seattle Captivate User Group meeting back in February so you're on my list until you make good... ).

Larry, if the reason you feel a need to direct personal comments to and about me in public discussion threads is that you're so incredibly curious about me, I'd be happy to converse via personal message. I mean, honestly, if "we" were so interested, all "we" had to do was ask.

Hi Lisa,

I'd love to have you in a Captivate class. Unfortunately, everything I have going on is in the Upper Midwest for the next several months. Do you have any plans to be in Chicago or Minneapolis in the near future?

I know little to nothing about "jbradley88", not even a gender. But I know he or she seems competent with Captivate, and is often helpful in this community - as the advice offered in this thread indicates. The reason I mention the lack of knowledge is due to the usual fears of meeting strangers on-line. I'm paranoid for others, because I have kids and grandkids who I watch give their most personal info to people on UTube or MySpace, and nothing I say seems to get through to them.

In my case, or that of any certified instructor, you can go to Adobe and get everything about a person, from personal interests to a recent photograph; all of which is simply to say, the entity behind the screen name "jbradley88" has always been secretive, but would have to be considered an "expert" with Captivate. Before arranging to allow anyone to look over your shoulder, please insist on running some basic checks on him or her to protect yourself.

Nothing personal, jbradley88. I've complimented you on some of your advice over some time, but by the time someone posts 250 messages, we generally know something about the person behind the screen name - and in your case, we (I) know nothing at all.

Have a good day, All!
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Lisa,

Here's a couple of suggestions you might try (although they are for Captivate 2, which means there might be minor deviations in process for Captivate 3):

1) Does your project always go red and break up at the same place? If so, maybe you can try increasing the image quality on that slide (double-click the slide and on the Slide Properties dialog, change the Quality dropdown to Optimized or High quality). That *might* trick the Flash Player into behaving correctly without having to break up the file.

Or, conversely, if your slides are already set to high quality, you can try lowering the quality and seeing if it helps things.

If neither of those work, your final option may indeed be to break your project into multiple smaller files and string them together behind the scenes. However, that's probably not an option if you're using a Learning Management System, since an LMS generally must launch each file itself in order to create the interface for communicating completion results.

2) To reduce your .cp filesize, go into the Captivate Library and delete all unused objects. In Captivate 2, the Library can be opened by going to the View menu and selecting "Show Library". Right-click on any item in the Library and choose "Select Unused Items". Then, right-click any of the selected items and choose "Delete". This will "clean up" your Captivate file.

Then, immediately do a Save As twice in a row and then close Captivate (I like to do a Save As by adding a 1 to the end of my filename, then Save As again back to my original filename). It seems to take two consecutive saves to do the trick, but for me it usually ends up shaving quite a bit off the size of my Captivate file. You do need to actually close Captivate to see the results, though.

FYI - If you run up against your deadline and continue to have issues, I live about a mile from Seattle U. I may not be able to help fix your problems but I can at least nod understandingly while you vent.

The two file types that tend to increase file-glut in Captivate are usually audio files, and full-motion files. Keep in mind what the FM files are - they are captured as AVI files that Captivate then converts to SWF for it's use. And AVI (audio-video-interleave) is one of the largest of of the video file types. BTW it is used because it is Windows "standard" for motion or video/audio display. But I digress.

When do I use it? Hardly ever, and even less than that on purpose. I do sometimes leave the settings on the FM tab of the Recording dialog to automatically shift into FM when a scrolling or dragging action is done during recording. But as a rule, I don't recommend using it all all.

The reason does include bandwidth and file size, but the main reason I avoid using FM is because it is not easy (impossible without an AVI editor) to add interactivity or text captions or any other object to an FM slide.

So in my opinion, FM is okay in Demos when used very sparingly, but it totally hacks the creation of any interactivity - and that's what I use Captivate for most of the time - to get the end-user involved in his or her own training by forcing him/her to pick up the mouse or put their hands on the keyboard to interact with the program I have created. You can't do that with FM.

Whether you heard it from Mark (Macrofireball) or someone else, "daisy-chaining" multiple small movies to create a larger one is a legitimate tactic. For my money there is an even better way to handle large files ... don't create them. And on that point, I am 99.9% certain that "Macrofireball" and every other Captivate community expert or long-time user will agree with me.

I simply mean that the best designed learning projects are made of many, many single to-the-point lessons. Each should have its own quizzing and question slides, and each should carefully cover a narrowly defined "bullseye" for that lesson. A very tiny learning target ... it might be "How to use the "SAVE AS" command", which can be taught in less than 15 slides (and without FM). The next lesson might be "How to apply Bolding, Italics, and Underlining to a "MS Word" document". Again, the lesson is tightly on-point, and a demo combined with an interactive simulation need not be longer than 30-40 slides total!

In other words, Lisa, 99% of being a great Captivate developer takes place before you open Captivate, when you sit down at a large conference desk, grab a stack of yellow legal lined pads and a carton of sharpened #2 lead pencils ( all this, probably with other "subject matter experts" (SMEs) present), and create the "script" for the overall training/learning effort to be incorporated in this overall project. It might involve 20 Captivate movies, and it might involve 100 Captivate movies ... but if your planning is done properly ahead of time, it will NOT involve any large files, or lengthy lessons during which your student nods off in boredom.

Sorry, I've just ranted on until I accidentally gave you the entire first hour of my class presentation - LOL!!!

All the best to you Lisa - hope this was of help to you.
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The project resize is under the Project menu item, then Resize Project. Be sure to de-select the checkbox for Maintain aspect ration first. Then change the height to add the header space. Since the new size is larger than the existing project, the "If new size is larger" half of the bottom part of the dialog box becomes enabled. Click the radio button to "Keep project the same size and fill background with color", then pick an appropriate background color for your header. Then in the Position project drop-down, select either bottom left or bottom right (doesn't matter since you didn't change the width). Then click Finish. Repeat the process for the footer, but this time position the project to one of the top choices (again it doesn't matter which one since the width hasn't changed).

As far as your other problem is concerned, I don't know for sure, but I would think the size is pretty big. It would certainly not hurt to break it up. Our published projects with 40 to 50 slides and audio typically are much smaller than 500,000 KB. The .cp files may be 100 MB or more, but the .swf is 5 to 10 MB.

We typically resize the project as one of the last steps in our creation process. First we resize to add about 25 pixels to the top of the slide (keeping our current project at the bottom) to create a header for the menu (which we put at top left)and the lesson title, etc. Then we resize a second time (this time keeping the current project at the top) to add about 50 pixels to the bottom to create a footer. This footer is large enough for the playback control bar and 2 lines of closed captioning text with a decent size font.

Be sure to save a copy before you resize since you can't un-do it if you mess up.

Hope this helps.