Summary: The new Articulate Studio ’09 Update 5 now makes inserting Captivate content easier than ever.
Difficulty: Medium

New Update To Articulate Studio ’09 !

Good news for Articulate and Captivate 4 users ! When Adobe released an update to their screen recording program last year, it seemed that it had suddenly become incompatible with any other third-party software that it had previously worked with. While Captivate 3 remained full compatible with Articulate Presenter 5 or Studio ’09, Captivate 4 caused echo problems with the audio and made controlling the movie via the Articulate interface impossible as testified by Articulate users on the forums.

Adobe tried to correct some of the issues by issuing an update last month which resolved the problem of the echoing audio.

New Update To Studio ’09

On Wednesday, Articulate released a brand new free update to Studio ’09 which now fully supports Captivate 4 and will come as a welcome relief to those users who still rely on Captivate for screen recordings while preferring Articulate for presentation delivery.

Yet again, we are reminded how flexible and open Studio ’09 is to other third-party software. Presenter ’09 in particular allows you to import practically any third-party content be it via the Insert Flash tool or the Web Object tool.

Quick Demo

To show you how the Articulate engineers have resolved the much reported issues of Captivate 4, take a look at this demo. Note how the Articulate player controls are able to stop and pause the Captivate movies.

 

 

View Demo

Note that in the demo above slides 3 and 4 take a little time to load so you might want to find a better loading system for heavy movies. Slide 5 is also a Captivate movie with the audio recorded in Articulate via the Record Narration tool. It loads quicker.

How Do You Do It?

Publish Your Captivate Movie

1. Create your presentation in Captivate.
2. Publish ideally at a framerate of 30 fps.

 



 

3. If you want a skin, then choose the default settings. You’ll want to make sure that your Captivate skin does not include the Exit button as this causes an error within Presenter. Uncheck the Exit button in the skin options as shown below:

 



 

4. Check that your Captivate movie will fit into your slide. In standard view, your movie should be no larger than 720 x 540 pixels. Your publish dialog box should look something like this:

 




 

5. If you don’t want the Captivate skin, then one way to remove the skin is to externalize the skin from the main SWF file. That way, you’ll have two published files, the main SWF and the ‘skin’ SWF.

 



 

6. Go to your published Captivate files and locate the main SWF file. If you externalized the skin, you don’t want to choose the SWF file that has the word ‘skin’ as part of its name. You are now ready to import it into Presenter ’09.

 

 

Import Into Presenter ’09

1. Open PowerPoint and go to the Articulate menu.
2. Select “Flash Movie”. The Insert Flash Movie dialog box will open.
3. Point to the Captivate movie you want to import in the published Captivate files.
4. Leave the settings as default.

 



 

5. Close the dialog box and publish your presentation.

 

More Goodies To Come

There are other great enhancements to Studio ’09 which I will go over in future posts. For the moment, be sure to get your version updated right away by downloading here or by contacting Articulate support. Gabe has gone over some of the highlights of the release here and you’ll also be able to read the release notes for each of the programs.

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