OAM and HTML5 projects

[bunki]

I have been reading hundreds of discussions and articles on all of the internet for months now. I am very familiar with Animate and previous Director environments. But Captivate is fairly new to me. Wasted many days of valuable time. My problem is to convert a set of old SWF based Interactive presentations in to new LMS compatible with HTML5 and SCORM. Numerous experts talk and advice on the matter, yet I found no one is straightforward with a practical example. Following is what i have learnt so far.

- Only supported animation import format from Animate is OAM or HTML with JScript.

- Existing .fla projects can be converted to HTML5 canvas and then exported to either of the above.

- Captivate supports import of both these formats.

And now the problem starts.

- When imported to captivate, both above files display following issues

     1. Irregular automatic playback on Preview section of the Library. No Stop/Play button appear. Once I imported an OAM file and I had to crash Captivate to stop its invisible playback of sound.

     2. When placed on the timeline, they dont synchronize with timeline at all. All the time sprite appear shorter than original. When we extend it, it will play only for the first time in publication

     3. While on Timeline, they do not real-time update stage display. This is really surprising feature drop for Captivate.

     4. When previewed HTML 5 and published, with some effort they can be played only once per loading. If we drag the play head back, these animations do not update reversal accordingly. If we pause play head, still they will play to the end on the first round.

So, have I missed another alternative solution with some other file format and procedure here? Or is it due to lack of my knowledge in advanced functions of Captivate? If my track of working is correct, I cannot understand what kind of industry is relying on Captivate for future with HTML 5. Without animations, we cannot create effective e-learning materials. So if the only supported vehicle from Animate to Captivate is this troublesome and unprofessional, what kind of professionals exist in this industry?

I am now facing a major trauma in providing a solution to my client. I never thought Captivate is this erroneous and support less on this issue. This is may last attempt to grab any knowledge that I have missed in solving my problem.

So any expert's advice is much appreciated.

[RodWard]

I understand your current dilemma.  Many of us are also now faced with the task of updating older SWF-based courses to HTML5.  But I think you may be a little harsh here in your criticism of Captivate alone. Your OAM animations were created in Animate. Have you also logged a similar complaint on the Animate forum?  These are both Adobe apps.

You need to remember that Captivate was originally an entirely Flash-based tool and although SWF animations WERE able to be synchronised with the Captivate timeline that doesn't necessarily mean that all other animation formats would do the same.  It's just not that simple to achieve.

OAMs currently have to run in an iFrame within the HTML5 content.  That's part of the reason why their timeline's are completely separate.  There are ways to get them to work more closely together, but it currently requires advanced JavaScript skills to achieve.

Feel free to log an enhancement request with the Adobe Captivate development team about your issue.  IF it were possible for OAMs to work more like SWFs did in the past then it's definitely one of those things that I think would be great to have in Captivate.

[bunki]

Thank you for the lead Rod. Could give me some further leads on using advanced javascript for OAM? Does that means use of embed option in Property panel?.

I will try on that lead in the meantime. I will put a log bit later since I must give a solution to my client within days now. As we can see this is a critical issue in Captivate and should have been addressed prior.

[RodWard]

In a perfect world everything we wanted would have been set up before we thought of it.  But this is NOT that world.

It's not as simple as using the Embed code option.  That will still have the animation run inside an iFrame.

Back in the day, part of the reason Flash SWF technology was so wonderful for animations was that it had the concept of a timeline measured in Frames Per Second.  Each 'symbol' within an SWF could be a Movie Clip that had its own separate timeline.  Adobe Animate OAMs use Create.JS to simulate a timeline.  Captivate's HTML5 output also simulates a timeline but the coding approach is not based on Create.JS  The two timelines are not linked in any way.  The OAM is like a mini website playing within a window (the iFrame) on another website (the Captivate HTML5 output).

If you were going to pull off synchronised timelines for your project you would need to budget a significant part of your expenses to hire the services of a really good JavaScript programmer who could come up with a way to lock the two timelines together so that an OAM on a Captivate slide played in lockstep with that slides timeline.  I have no idea how long it would take to crack that nut.