Articulate and Captivate

[Mawms]

Hi--I'm investigating using Articulate to produce some online training that includes screen shots and audio. The last time I created this kind of training, I used Adobe Captivate because you can capture screen movement via full motion video and actually walk through the software. However with voice as well, the finished files were so large, it was hard to convert them to flash and play them back. (Experienced instances of program crashing or freezing up.)

Has anyone out there worked with both products and could give me a comparison of the two? I'd like to hear some suggestions and discussion about benefits vs. drawbacks of one product over the other. Has anyone ever used the two products in combination? For instance, can you do some video in Captivate, convert it to Flash and then import it to Articulate? How did that work?

I would appreciate any help or suggestions you have. Thanks.

[Justin]

See:

Using Captivate content in Articulate Presenter at Dave Mozealous

and

How To Add A Captivate Movie To Articulate Presenter

[karina]

I use the two together all the time. Captivate is much more time-consuming to use than Articulate, so I only use it when there's something I want to accomplish that I can't do in Articulate/PowerPoint. While you can publish to SCORM using Captivate, if you're adding tests & so forth it's just not time-efficient.
You don't need to convert video from captivate if you've published it--it creates an swf file that you can embed or link to in your Articulate Presenter or Engage . You can also import the skin, if you want, to give your users control, though that's a little trickier. I have found both articles Justin recommended very helpful.