Jump to content

Anyone use audio in Adobe Captivate?


Lee Knight

Recommended Posts

  • Moderators

More specifically...

 

Captivate captures screen activity, software demos, etc., and converts them to what I believe is basically vector info to facilitate low overhead demos and eLearning docs. It seems well suited to recording VO to the action. And there is a "Background" track for music, etc. But I need to create offline voiceover mirroring the live VO.

 

The basic idea. Make the voice sound smart, perfect and together. So I'm going to take these presentations, record pro VO to them, mirroring the original VO with prettifications, and lay them back into Captivate. We need to use Captivate as the final render software because there is a fair bit of interactive "click on this" activity. So... I have devised a workflow that bypasses what I perceive to be Captivate's audio limitations, but I wondered...

 

...has anyone pioneered the Captivate audio plains?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

Last I worked on it was Captivate 3 ( a few years ago , was an instructional designer for customer service training ) ... in short ... adding audio is a little hit and miss ...

 

At that time the best workflow I could find was ( in general ) ..complete the video part and record the audio while watching the swf file ... it still required some manipulation. Captivate offered at that time basic audio editing tools ... so sometimes I recorded in Sound Forge and just added the MP3s to the library and juggled them on the timeline ... as I remember I had to do this on a slide by slide basis

 

Audio triggered by an interaction was easily worked by putting the audio on the timeline after the action takes place ... I think there was also a way to use the asset itself to trigger it ...

 

Anyway .. I am no longer as up on it as when I was working it everyday ... I can send you some examples of the primitive stuff I was delivering for the LAN network ( we based it on a whopping 128kb connection ... and it went all over the world to mostly 800-600 CRT screens ...Yep! only a few years ago actually ) .. I think I can bundle the .cp files so you could open them if that is helpful ..

 

pm for tel and email..I am in WLA just up the road from you ... glad to chat ... good luck with the project .. Captivate took an unwieldy amount of tweaking ...but there was really nothing else like it back in the Cap 3 days ... jk

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderators

Thank you!!!! Yes, that's what I've found. It's pretty limited in it's ability to spot. I think the workflow, that will be starting today actually, will be to record the VO offline in Sound Forge. Have the producer render the Captivate project as a .MOV as a temp for me to spot to. Then I'll open the temp .MOV and my files, that I'll probably record as separate files of a sentence or 2 each. I'll open it all up in Final Cut and then spot my files to his project. Render the Final Cut session as a .wav and import to Captivate from zero as one long VO file.

 

In effect, offline editing, then import one full VO file per Captivate session.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

Lee .. I think you have it ... I also used to dump the cap swf file into Flash and do the same thing..oddly I remember Flash to be a little better for audio cutting ... ... or dump it into Premiere or Vegas ( as swf or mov ) ... it really depends on how complex the interactions are per slide ... sometimes I would build the entire deal in Premiere or After Effects and render as a swf and bring it back to Captivate !! ... it was on a slide by slide / per interaction basis ... depending on how many times Cap 3 would crash !! ...

 

sounds like you are dealing with a finalized video at least ...I suppose you should be matching the frame rates in CAP and FCP ..if you can do it one shot great !! your PM is full ... call if I can assist or you need emotional support ...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...