Captivate in Articulate

[daveperso]

I have seen quite a few posts on the forum about inserting Captivate 3 material in Articulate Presenter and while I don't use or own Captivate, I thought I'd just draw together some of the information that is been round on the forum to give a few pointers to those who might wish to embark down this road.

First you might want to look at a quick demo I put together which shows a Captivate 3 movie in Presenter in the first slide, and a Captivate 3 movie in Engage (which in this case is also in Presenter) on the second slide. The thing which differentiates Captivate 3 or indeed Camtasia from plain .SWF movies is that they are generally made up of multiple files, so you can't just reference a swf and hope for the best because it just won't work.

The following procedure is for Captivate only. I will something on Camtasia later.

Let us first look at putting Captivate into Engage. Although there is no hard fixed rule on this, generally speaking you can embed all Captivate content by importing the 'skin' swf of your Captivate movie into Engage and then manually placing the rest of your published Captivate movie in the engage_content folder of your published Engage interaction.

First, take a look at your Captivate files. For example, the below screenshot shows the files for a simple Captivate movie entitled 'Hip'.



Notice the file called hip_skin.swf. This is the file which will need to be referenced in Engage.

Now create your interaction in Engage and add this .SWF using the 'Add Media' or 'Change Media' function. In the example below, we can see the Media Tour Interaction. Here, we are selecting the hip_skin.swf within Engage.



Assuming that you are publishing Engage to be viewed locally or on the Web, go to Publish -> Web and save your interaction locally, making note of where you have saved it.

Finally, we have to manually move the remaining Captivate files to the Engage interaction. Go to your Captivate files and select and copy the remaining Captivate files as shown below.



Open your published Engage interaction and you will see two files, engage.html and engage.swf, and one folder, engage_content.

Open the engage_content folder and paste the remaining contents of your Captivate movie in this folder, giving you something like this:



Now you should be able to go back to the engage.html file and launch your Engage interaction with the Captivate movie embedded within.

[daveperso]

If you want to embed a Captivate within Presenter rather than Engage, then the process is more or less identical. Instead of using the 'Add Media' function of Engage, you will use the 'Insert Flash Movie...' of Presenter.

1. First, go to Articulate -> Insert Flash Movie
2. Navigate again to the 'skin' swf of your Captivate presentation.
3. Select 'Move to next slide when user clicks next' as Presenter will not be able to tell when your Captivate movie has finished.
4. Click Finish.
5. Publish as normal (to the Web for example).
6. Now, get the same Captivate files that you copied before with Engage (all except the skin swf you referenced directly in Presenter) and place them in the SWF folder of your Data folder (not on the player.html or root level as you would if you were linking to external files for example).

And that's it. You're Captivate movie should play in Presenter.

[SFNancy]

Dave -

On behalf of (it sure seems so) the many Captivate/Articulate users out there, THANK YOU for taking the time to put this together. Very helpful!

SFNancy

[daveperso]

Finally if you want your Captivate movie to play in Engage in Presenter, like in the example above, the easiest way to do this, is to make sure that your Captivate files are correctly placed in the engage_content folder of your Articulate Presenter PROJECT files. That way, when you publish your Articulate Presenter presentation, it will automatically pull in those Captivate files each and every time, so you don't have to keep doing that every time you publish Presenter.

1. First prepare your Engage interaction and use the 'Add Media' function to reference the 'skin' swf of your Captivate movie.
2. Publish to Presenter making sure, of course, that you have already prepared a Powerpoint presentation to host it.
3. Now navigate to the PROJECT FOLDER of your Articulate presentation. This will be at the same level and folder as your Powerpoint file and will have the name of your Powerpoint file.
4. Open the folder and you will see an engage folder with name like engage_257.
   
   
5. Open that engage folder and you will see another folder called engage_content.
   
   
6. Open that folder and you have reached the place where you need to drop your remaining Captivate files.
   
   
7. Switch back to your original Captivate files and copy all the files except your skin swf which you have already referenced in Engage and then switch back to the engage_content folder and paste them there giving you something like this.
   
   

Now, everytime you publish Articulate Presenter, your Captivate and Engage files will be pulled in automatically into Presenter.

[jnsam]

Thanks Dave,

I've been reading a lot on this as I'm a Cap2 user and undecided on upgrading to Cap3. In Cap2 I can publish to Flash 6 that creates a single swf for the project.

When Cap3 came out, they eliminated this and only Flash formats with multiple swfs are available. That pretty much closed the door on my desire to upgrade.

I found this blog entry that folks may be interested in:

Silke Fleischer: Creating a Single SWF with Adobe Captivate 3

Some nice tips if they apply to what you're doing and possibly save some of the file moving you describe. I've put feature requests at Adobe (to bring back single swf output) and here (to have Articulate support the multi-swf format).

I hope Articulate comes through as I think the multi-swf format is the future.

[Spectre]

I liked Captivate 3's ability to output to multiple SWFs and understand why they did it, but I too was disappointed that the option to compile as a single SWF was no longer there. Since I use my own preloader in AP, I don't need my Captivate projects to split into multiple files.

For this reason, I have chose to sit on the sidelines for Captivate 3--as I pretty much use only the screen recording part of it.

Phil

[Veghead22]

Dave,

Have you done this same thing with Camtasia files yet? I'm having trouble. When I publish as a flash file in Camtasia, the only flash files (swf) that I see are controller and preloader swf files. I've tried several methods, but unsuccessful thus far. Thanks!

[Veghead22]

Might be making some progress...it was producing as an flv instead of swf on the important files. I'm republishing and will let you know if this works.

[daveperso]

Camtasia is a little more complicated.

When inserting into a standalone Engage presentation, then all Camtasia files must be inserted at the same level as engage.swf (and not in the engage_folder).

If Engage is then being inserted into Presenter, then all files must be placed at the top level (ie. same level as player.html) EXCEPT the flv file (if there is one) which should be placed in the player folder.

This was true with Camtasia 4. Haven't checked yet with Camtasia 5.

Hope that helps.

[bdusablon]

What about publishing to LMS out of Articulate with this? It doesn't bring the .swfs into the SCORM folder or the zip file - I tried it manually with no luck.

We're publishing a 7-slide Articulate presentation with 7 captivate movies.