Introduction

For more than 2 years now I’ve been using Adobe’s tools for creating e-learning material. The two tools I’ve been using the most are:

• Adobe Captivate
• Adobe Presenter

I’ve been stuck on an older version of Captivate for a while (Captivate 3). Although Captivate 3 has worked well for me, there has been one nagging issue. When I create movies in Captivate 3, each demo consists of a main flash file and a set of smaller flash files that captures the parts of the demo that requires full movie capture (e.g.., drag-n-drop). It turns out that when you that this is a problem when producing SCORM modules. This content ends up being presented as a white screen. We’ve also noticed quite a bit of lag issues.

I was excited when I heard Captivate 5 had been released and after having confirmed that it solved my issues, I bought it immediately.

This blog is about my experiences with Captivate 5 which as we’ll see have not been all good. I don’t want my blog entry to overly negative. Captivate 5 is a great tool, but some of the problems in it are so severe that I think they deserve some light.

Problem 1: It Doesn’t Work with Presenter!

I had previously produced a set of material for a company selling testing tools. Their clients had noticed the problem of Captivate 3 of lag and white screens. Hence, they were excited to hear that I had acquired the new Captivate and started to update my material.

I open up the Captivate 3 project and Captivate 5 detected the material as Captivate 3 and started the conversion to Captivate 5. I noticed how the tool now is much faster and the interface a bit better, but other than that, everything looked as normal.

Next I replaced the old flash files in Adobe Presenter with the newly published flash demos. Here is my first surprise…. The tool warned

THIS CONTENT MAY NOT PLAY IN PRESENTER

Really??? They are just flash files. I realized that maybe there is also a newer version of Adobe Presenter… So I updated Adobe Presenter and after that the problem went away. Great!

Then I reimported the flash demos into Presenter. This time, no complaints. I generated the SCORM modules from presenter, again everything looked normal. I continued doing the same work for a set of my other presentations and after many hours of work, I had completed the transformation for my client.

I pushed it over to the Learning Management Site (LMS) and then tried it out. Now I was in for a surprise. All the movies played in 5 seconds (no matter if they were 15 minutes long).

After a lot of investigation I found out that Adobe Presenter does not support Action Script 3. This is to me quite incredible oversight from Adobe. It seems as if the ones creating Presenter do not talk to the ones creating Captivate. Although marketing seems to have no problems claiming (from Adobe FAQ):

Does Adobe Captivate 5 integrate with Adobe Connect™ and Adobe Presenter?

It does. Adobe Captivate 5 provides tight integration with Adobe Connect software, allowing authors to improve training effectiveness by adding a layer of interactivity to Adobe Presenter presentations and Adobe Connect online meetings. Users can also publish Adobe Captivate files directly to Adobe Connect Enterprise Server, to deliver content through standard web browsers, and track and manage courses and learners

I contacted the Adobe Technical Support and reported it as a bug. After some back and forth (it seemed at first the tech support team was also unaware of this). I got this message back:

Captivate 5 swf files are AS3 files which are not supported by Presenter. Presenter only supports AS2 swf so an AS3 swf may or may not work properly. We have this issue on our radar , please standby for the updates.

So I’m waiting for the updates…. I’ve been waiting for a while now, but I have a feeling this is not all that high on Adobe’s priority list.

Problem 2: You better have a Fast Computer!

I do have some pretty good computers. My desktop has 2 dual core processors running hyper-threading (appears like 8 CPU’s). It has 16 GB of memory and runs 64 bit operating system. Great machine.

My laptop is also state of the art. It is a Dell 6400 with a quad-core CPU and 8 GB of RAM. When I bought it (about a year ago) it was the fastest laptop I could buy. Also a really good machine. It’s also running 64 bit OS.

My preference is to use my laptop to produce material. It is slightly more quiet and my microphone picks up a bit of background noise. I decided I would put some demos up on YouTube (see previous blog entry). To do so, you have to publish your content as Flash Movies (fla-files). This is one of the options when publishing content from Captivate, so no problem. I produced a few files without incident.

I had a demo that is 11 minutes long. I noticed that after about 6 minutes of production (Captivate plays the demo while producing the fla file) my machine became non-responsive. I had to finally kill Captivate and try again. Again, after about 6-7 minutes I had the same problem. This time I had to restart my machine. Now suspecting a bug in Captivate, I decided to kill all programs but Captivate while producing my movie. Again, the same problem, however, it produced some content. However, when I played the content afterwards, the voice and pictures where out of sync (by minutes!).

I now moved the file to my monster desktop and try to produce the movie there. This worked! However, while producing the fla-file, the CPU utilization was hovering around 60%.

Although I understand that the transformation of flash to video is algorithmically challenging, it seems only a few people I know have computers fast enough to produce the movies.

Problem 3: No HD Movie?

When demo movies to YouTube, it is quite important to build high-resolution movies. Most demos I see are so fuzzy I can’t really see what’s going on on the screen. I did a little research and found that the best format for YouTube is 1280 X 720.

This makes a lot of sense if you know something about PAL and resolutions for HD movies.

I decided to record one of my presentation’s in this format in Captivate. This worked perfectly. I created a flash presentation in1280 by 720. After having published it as flash (to our web site), I decided to also push it to YouTube.

To make a long story short, it turns out that Captivate can not publish fla files in this format! Their maximum with is 1024 (this is only for movies, not for flash).

This again seems like a major oversight from Adobe.

Conclusion

Adobe has always been one of my favorite software companies. I used to love Framemaker, I love Photoshop, Captivate 3 was revolutionary and Presenter worked well with Captivate 3. My recent experience with their software has been disappointing. The release of Captivate 5 seems premature and its lack of integration with Presenter quite puzzling. It also seems strange that they do not seem to have tested their tool for typical scenarios (e.g., how well does the tool work for publishing content to YouTube?).

I will keep my faith in Adobe though. I hope they will fix their problems soon.

I think I'll write an article later about IEEE 1471-2000... and the current state of the Adobe tools seems such great example of why you need to evaluate your architecture from multiple view points :)