Last Session of the Day - Tips and Tricks for Adobe Captivate and Presenter

presented by Silke Fleischer of Adobe systems - I'm sure you've seen her blog, she's responsible for product management and marketing for Adobe Captivate.

There isn't a handout for this session, so I will try to document as much as possible. Silke will be making the notes available on her blog in the next couple of days.

Her co-presenter is RJ Jacquez, Sr. Product Evangelist - how's that for a title.

The developer from India is here also taking about Captivate 4! Should I sign up for the focus group? New features are on the way!

Silke starts out with what does Captivate do?
Software demos and simulations
Softskills and branched scenarios
Presentations
Games
Editing Virtual Classroom Sessions
FAQ's
Sim-ericials
Rapid Prototyping
Assessments & Quizzes
Basic Animations
Pod Casts and Screen Casts (I totally need to try this tonight when I get back to my room).

On to tips and Tricks-
File Size - consider reducing the recording area - SF uses 720x640 typically.
Remove background noise - set desktop to standard color, avoid gradients, remove excess desktop icons.
Limit Full Motion Recording
Limit Media - compress audio and apply image compression

and lastly - Keep your projects short! 3 minutes is recommended by SF and link them together using the skin menu.

Try to keep it to a Single SWF - avoid additional files by unchecking the borders under Project/Skins/ on the border tab, integrate full motion slides with an swf file (i.e. generate the full motion slide, export as swf, then import into final project and republish).

On the website there is a full motion editor as a swf available on the adobe developer site.

Multiple levels of feedback are available with quiz questions using the timelines and limiting responses to 1 try, then putting in multiple clickboxes scheduled one after the other on each other within the timeline.


Inserting Adobe Captivate Content into PowerPoint deliver seamless presentations with demos and simulations integrated into your PowerPoint slides and insert Flash files in PowerPoint slides using Adobe Presenter (needed for Office 2007 applications).

Share - share.adobe.com is a service to be offered in the future that will allow you to drop your content into it and allow people without an LMS to publish content easily.

RJ came in at this point and demonstrated Adobe AIR but to be honest, I'm running out of steam so check out the website for more information on that product.

Post your content on YouTube or a video Ipod - publish as a 320x240 screen as a .wmv, .avi, .mov or .mpg using Sothink SWF to Video Converter Remember however, that you will have to rethink the level of interactivity when you do this.

Using Adobe Exchange - free content ranging from templates to widgets - check out the faster/slower buttons someone just uploaded.

Auto- TextCaptions - Defaults and Languages which we have seen before, but SF says that we can change the .rdl files and make changes to the default text using Notepad (looks very much like html) - there is an article in the dev center that talks about this. Another application for this tip is to create autotext in a language that didn't ship with Captivate.

Keeping Tab Key press within content in the browser - I wasn't quick enough to write down the HTML code, but check out SF's post later this week.

Adding Easter Eggs to your training - you can use captivate to add easter eggs to create contests or increase the level of interactivity with your projects.

the preloader can be changed - you can change the 60% requirement.

Stay tuned for more tips and tricks from tomorrow's Master Class.