Sounds like you’re looking for a course player or xml tree menu player that lists chapters and subchapters. Take a look at this post and click the PowerPoint Essentials course link: http://community.articulate.com/blogs/david/archive/2011/02/07/essential-powerpoint-features.aspx

Is that the kind of player or wrapper you’re looking for?

I use Captivate 5 to create tutorials/software simulations for training purposes. We want to place the flash files into a “wrapper” that provides a list of the chapters, the length of each chapter, and the ability to click ahead to another chapter within the same file. Any idea how I can find that? I’m not finding anything within Captivate on this. Is it the right tool? Do I need to add some sort of plug-in to get what I want?

Thanks!

I found wp-swfobject to be a great plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-swfobject/

Also created a screenr on the process:

Thanks,
Deb

You can export images and audio from Captivate that can be imported into Camtasia. Your audio narration might be fine and you could lay that track down in Camtasia and just re-capture your visual content in Camtasia?

There’s no true integration but if you have your Captivate source files, you have access to most of the assets you’ll need.

Another option would be to convert the .swf to .avi and bring the .avi into Camtasia. You’re now double-compressing your files so expect some quality degradation. It could be a short term solution if you needed to enhance or update callouts in your current files.

One last idea would be to use a .swf converter and extract all the images from the final Captivate swf file. This will generate a lot of slides that could be imported into Camtasia. This gets messy so beware:-)

I’m curious, why are you switching from Captivate to Camtasia? Was it for a specific feature?

I have tried every way to publish them but cannot open them in Camtasia. Help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks very much

I hadn’t heard of Accordent but checked out their demo. It was nicely done and I can see where some time would be required to sync the two together.

Have you looked at trying the beta of Camtasia Relay? http://www.techsmith.com/camtasiarelay.asp

This seems to do something similar to Accordent Capture Station. I was hoping Camtasia would show some demos but from their guided tour it appears it supports video and presentation recording.

I used to create elearning for automotive training and we would take hours of videos into Flash and sync up graphics and text with the video instruction. Definitely a production time-tiger, but effective.

Besides Camtasia Relay, I don’t of products specializing in this. I’ve asked a colleague who manages events for a consulting company. If he knows of anything, I’ll ask him to follow up here.

David

Are you familiar with Accordent Technologies Capture Station? I’m trying to see if there is another tool that has the same functionality. The best way I can describe it is, a proprietary software that takes a VGA source and a video source, syncs them and imbeds them in a “webinar-like” precreated skin. The skins are customizable and the file is editable using Accordent’s editing software. The content can be streamed live and/or saved for later on-demand posting.

I work at a hospital in the training department. We have tons of requests to videotape meetings, inservices and continuing education lectures. Currently we are videotaping the speaker (mostly talking head, but not always) and editing the powerpoint slides into the video using Final Cut. Obviously this is an overly time-intensive process.
Do you know of any products that can capture and automatically sync full motion video and a VGA source such as powerpoint? Any help or advice would be much appreciated!!

Thank you so much for your help!!

*Yes, each user who wishes to create video tutorials will need to have his/her own license. There are some free screen recorders available. These might be one way to get your project up and running. Check out http://camstudio.org/ as one example for the PC.

*Camtasia isn’t free. CamStudio might be what you’re thinking of? But to your question re: importing, yes, current versions of Camtasia import previous projects without issue.

*Captivate and Camtasia project (source) files can’t be imported. Their output (.mov, .avi, etc) can in most cases. Not sure you’d want to do that since the video output will have some degree of compression and quality could begin to degrade. I’m interested to know why you want to import one into another?

*Sure. We develop elearning using several programs: Flash, Captivate, Camtasia, Articulate and Lectora. Those are our primary authoring tools. While each tool has a “primary” use, they do overlap depending on the project, development team, resource availability and so on. We have a corporate brand and it’s maintained across all courseware. We use custom players to wrap around our elearning content. We have players for different types of content (software and soft skill) but we have designed branding that’s applied consistently to all players. We defined and designed the style guides using Photoshop. Items such as callout boxes or highlight treatments are also consistent across courses.

*I know Flash can easily pull in dynamic images. Not sure about Captivate and Camtasia. This is a great example where you might want to create your player “wrapper” (could be html, flash) that holds your client’s logo. The player could be changed per client and all you would do is change the logo for each. Make sense?

Camtasia would probably be better in this example. Another option would be to use FRAPS (http://www.fraps.com/) which is considerably less expensive than Camtasia. Good option if you only need to capture what’s playing on screen.

I hope that helps and please let me know if you’d like more info.

David

I have some questions about this kind of software. I´m currently working in a project which will provide free software tutorials on the web. These tutorials will be created mostly by 2 to 3 persons, but anyone (in the World) should be able to create new tutorials.

I don´t know the licence agreement of each software, but I believe I will not be able to get a cheap licence to anyone that will want to create tutorials for my organization/project, right?

So, I thought that camtesia could be a good solution, because there are a free version of it that anyone can use it for free. The project could then be easily imported to the new version of camtesia to create a better looking presentation, right? And what about Captivate? Could camtesia files be imported into Captivate for edit? This would be important because I need the simulation functionality from Captivate, which I think it is not given by camtasia.

I don´t know if I´m in the right direction, but maybe someone could help me on this

Also, what do you mean by this: “you can create a consistent look and feel and share across programs so that won’t be an issue. Design the template in Photoshop and use for each program.”?

Let me explain why I´m interested in this paragraph. Most of the tutorials will be based in powerpoint presentations and software examples/demonstrations (desktop screen). For both I´m thinking in a simple capture of the screen. In the case of the powerpoint part of the tutorial, I will try to use the same template for consistency, however, I think you are talking about a more generic approach. Can you explain it better? Ideally, can I see an exemple of it? Is it easy to change at any time, using either camtesia or captivate?

Finally, using either solutions, and presuming the final output is a swf file, is it possible to dynamically show an image in that swf file (after been distributed to the web), using for instance a URL. I ask this because would be nice to change, for instance, the logo of the sponsor of specific videos, when the sponsor changes.

Thank you!