Page 2 of 2   « previous page

When a file is imported into Flash the entire movie is placed on the Flash timeline. This means if you have a Captivate movie that is 30 seconds in duration you can reasonably expect to see a Flash timeline that is 900 frames long because Captivate movies play at a rate of 30 frames per second. When you consider that there are performance degradations in Flash when the frame count exceeds 16,000 frames, there are going to be some issues with longer Captivate movies. If you are a Flash developer and think you can get around this by importing the movie directly into the Library, think again. There is a known Flash bug involving .png images that will crash Flash if you try to drag the Captivate movie clip to the Main timeline.

When you do import a Captivate movie to the Flash stage pay careful attention to the Captivate Options dialog box (see Figure 11). The more items you deselect - the End Options, Hints, and Playback Controller are good candidates - the smaller the movie will be. Also, the Flash Library is populated with bitmaps for every item on every slide, each slide is indicated on the Flash timeline with a Label on the timeline, and, finally, if you create Question slides where the user takes a test, these slides currently don't import into Flash.

The other "gotcha" to be aware of is the fact that Captivate movies play at roughly 30 frames per second. Flash movies traditionally play at 12-15 frames per second. If you "downshift" the Captivate movie to that rate, you will wind up with fewer Flash frames but the timing of other media such as sounds and .swf files containing mouse movements will also be profoundly affected.

Having said all of that, the ability to move smaller Captivate movies into Flash allows you to take full advantage of all of the Flash Player 7 features - streaming video for example - that are simply unavailable in Captivate. They may require a bit of extra work to "clean up", but in many respects the effort is worth it.

Conclusion
As you may have guessed, Macromedia has taken RoboDemo, turned it inside out, and rearranged its molecules. The end result is Captivate. I will tell anybody who cares to listen that Macromedia has a solid hit on its hands because it hands Web developers an easy-to-learn and easy-to-master tool that allows them to extend their service offerings. Educators, in both the private and the public sectors, once they catch on to what it can do and how easily it integrates with their existing Learning Management System, are going to give this application more than a passing look. Even so, like all Macromedia products, Captivate is deep, rich, feature laden, and most important, a heck of a lot of fun.

Page 2 of 2   « previous page