Summary: You can include Captivate movies into Articulate Presenter. This may involve manually copying the Captivate files into the Articulate published files.

Difficulty: Medium

NOTE: THE PROCEDURE FOR INSERTING CAPTIVATE MOVIES IN PRESENTER ‘09 IS THE SAME AS DESCRIBED BELOW FOR PRESENTER 5. ONLY THE INTERFACE FOR ADDING FLASH MOVIES IN PRESENTER HAS CHANGED.

Articulate Presenter brings everything together

Many course designers don’t like to put all their eggs in one basket and use different tools to get what they are after. One of the great things about Articulate Presenter is that it allows you to put the vast majority of those productions into one shell whether they be created with Camtasia, Flash, Raptivity, Captivate or any other tool out there and this is indeed a unique feature of Presenter.

This post looks at Captivate and basically copies and expands on one of the posts I made on the Articulate forums recently. The demo from this post on the forums shows how you can add Captivate to Presenter and Engage.

It is hosted on Articulate Online showing that you can have embedded Captivate movies in Presenter and still send them to your LMS.

I am not a big user of Captivate but I do know that there are different versions and that most people are using Captivate 2 or Captivate 3. I also know that Captivate can create single SWF movies (ie. the whole movie is contained in a single SWF file) or multiple-file movies (the movie is composed of a player shell, a main SWF file and other files which are important for the interactivity of the movie). Captivate 3 often creates multiple-file movies, for example if you include FLV video in your presentation.

SINGLE-FILE SWF CAPTIVATE MOVIE

If you use a single-file SWF movie, then the process for adding it to Presenter is much the same as you would follow to add any Flash movie to Articulate Presenter: via the Import Flash Movie tool in the Articulate menu.

Depending on the nature of the movie, you may need to set it to play After the slide has begun. Another issue concerns the inbuilt buffer that you may have in your Captivate movie which might conflict with the default buffer settings in Presenter. You may need to change the buffer to 0 in Presenter via the Insert Flash Movie wizard, for the conflict to disappear.

MULTIPLE-FILE CAPTIVATE MOVIES

The ‘fun’ starts when you have a multiple-file Captivate movie on your hands. Actually the process is quite simple, but you do need to do some manual shifting of files.

Let us assume you have your Captivate movie. Here is our Captivate movie as it stands by itself. It is a simple movie containing an FLV video (slideshow).

And here are the multiple files that make up our Captivate movie:

The movie is being launched by the file hip.html in our browser.

Now we want to insert this movie into Presenter. How do we do it?

• 1 Go to PowerPoint and then Articulate -> Insert Flash Movie

  

  Display in Slide, and choose to open the skin SWF file, in the case above hip_skin.swf. It should always contain the word skin in the title.

  

• 2 Keep the synchronization as default (Play Flash movie and slide in sync) but select Move to next slide when user clicks next. To avoid conflicts, set the buffer to 0 although this should not be an issue with the shell. Click Next and Finish and your Captivate shell is inserted into Presenter.

  

• 3 Now we just need to finish our Articulate Presenter presentation in PowerPoint and publish, either to the WEB or to an LMS or to Articulate Online as normal.
• 4 When you have published you need to go to the published files and locate the data folder. This image shows published files for loading on a regular web site:

  

  Then open the SWF folder:

  

  You’ll find files like those below.

  

  This is where your remaining Captivate files need to go (with the exception of the skin file which has already been inserted and which we can see above called fm_hip_skin.swf and the hip.html file which was solely used to launch the Captivate movie directly in the browser and the standard.js file which is also superfluous).

• 5 Copy the appropriate Captivate files.

  

• 6 Paste the above files into the SWF folder in the Presenter published files. You’ll have something like this:

  

• 7 You are now ready to launch your Articulate presentation by double-clicking on the player.html file. DO NOT REPUBLISH.

  

Here is the same Captivate movie inserted into Presenter:

If you are publishing to Articulate Online or an LMS, please see this article on how best to manually move your files.

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