Summary: Embedding Captivate movies is possible even if the movie consists of multiple files. The procedure is the same in Engage ’09 as with Engage 1.

Difficulty: Medium

 

Putting External Content Into Engage

The inclusion of Captivate movies into Articulate content proves to be a popular subject so in this article I have decided to focus on adding content to Engage. A number of people have also enquired as to whether the new upgrades to the Articulate Studio in any way affects how we do this.

First, let us look at our sample Captivate movie which I copied and published from the Captivate samples:

 

And here are the published files created by Captivate:

Notice the “skin.swf” (Soft Skills_skin.swf) and the regular swf file (Soft Skills.swf) .

Inserting Captivate into a Media Tour interaction

Let us first insert this Captivate movie into the Media Tour Interaction.

• Open Engage ’09 and choose to open a new Media Tour Interaction.
• Click “Change Media” below the photo of the sunflowers.
• Navigate to and select the skin.swf, Soft Skills_skin.swf and then click Open.

 



 

• Confirm that you want to overwrite the existing content (the picture of the sunflowers)
• Make other changes to your interaction (delete or create other steps, change title etc, remove Caption text) and save your changes.
• Publish to the Web.

 

Once it has published successfully, you get the Publish Successful dialog box.

 

 

If you preview now, you will only see the player in Engage since the player is contained in the skin.swf file we imported.

 

 

What we now need to do is to import the other Captivate files into the Engage interaction.

 

• Go back to the original Captivate files and select all the files except the skin.swf, the html file (we don’t need the html file since we are embedding the swf directly rather than displaying it as an html page in a browser) and the standard.js file (this is just a file to prevent a security warning appear when you view Flash content but is already included in the Engage interaction code).

If you are not sure which files to copy, you can copy them all. It won’t make a big difference in size and won’t make any functional difference either.

 



 

• Now go to your Engage PUBLISHED files (the files you published earlier in the Media Tour interaction) which by default will be in (My) Documents -> My Articulate Projects or click on “Open Folder” in the Publish Successful dialog box that you should still have open. It should look something like this:

 

 

• Open the engage_content folder.

 

 

• Paste the contents of your clipboard (which should contain the Captivate files you copied a minute ago) into this folder to give you something like this and notice the three extra files:

 



 

• Now go back up to the root level of your Engage interaction and launch the engage.html file. DO NOT REPUBLISH IN ENGAGE.

Your interaction should work something like this:

 

 

Note that you can have several Captivate movies in the same Engage interaction, one on each step.

Adding Captivate via Add Media in other interactions

 

Now let us look at another type of interaction, the Process Interaction. The Media Tour interaction is unique in that it does not offer you a choice of how you want to display your Flash movie but all the other interactions including the Process interaction give you a choice from three options, :

1) Embedded

2) Full size

3) In new window

The procedure is exactly the same as with the Media Tour interaction.

• Open a blank Process interaction
• Select Add Media on one of the step.
• Navigate, select and open the skin.swf of your Captivate movie.

Then choose how you wish to display your movie in the drop-down menu:

 

 

If you go for the Full Size option or the New Window option, you can leave the default value or change the default Flash image for your own. If you choose the Embedded option, you might want to make your image size as large as possible so that your users will be able to view it correctly.

Once you have edited your interaction, publish it as normal and follow exactly the same procedure as with the Media Tour to copy the other Captivate movie files into the engage_content folder.

Here are examples of the three options in this Engage interaction (click on the Flash arrows where necessary to see the movie):

 

 

Note that since I am displaying the same movie in each step, I don’t need to duplicate the Captivate project files each time.

Any questions? Feel free to post a comment.

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