Getting deeper into understanding how Captivate works, I was really surprised (and happy) to learn that many of the techniques used are the same as using Flash, Soundbooth and other programs.

Step by step, I perused all of the Adobe Captivate Tutorials – Beyond Basics tutorials. Now I am confident that I can create projects, add slides, capture what I do on the computer, add captions if needed, add either background or slide music and sound effects, and some animation effects (if needed), and publish to a range of platforms.

So now my little ‘non-professional’ beginner movie looks like:

Next step?

I am now moving onto the advanced tutorials – and looking forward to it!

And so the journey continues …

My first unprofessional movie, is still very much ‘unprofessional’ but now I’ve learned how to add captions (Which really wasn’t as hard as I thought). Lesson learned here – it does pay to read tutorials written by the company that created and published the software .

My movie ‘with’ added captions …

Learned from the Adobe tutorial – Add text captions

Next… Adjusting the timing of objects (could be interesting)

Bugger!

Did anyone see the last ten minutes when I was reading through the timing tutorial, and found out that I had already done this to the movie above! w00t. New next step… Moving onto ‘Beyond’ Basic tutorials

This is it! This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but never had the software to do it, until now. I had tried online ‘free’ versions and other opensource products and even though many of them were great – they were still limiting for what I wanted to do. So here starts my journey into learning Adobe Captivate 5.5.

Using Adobe Captivate Tutorials – Getting Started guide  “Recording a Project” I managed to fumble my way through a very very rough, non-professional, short recording, as can be seen below.

I set the recording to basic 640px x 480px size.. with no panning or anything else that looked scarey to use for the first time. I was able to select which ‘window’ to record from – in this case Photoshop. As a test, all I did was attempt to open a file in photoshop. It worked.

Next I was then able to save the Captivate project and then export, or rather, publish for a variety of different media.

1. Published to *.exe format. Worked like a charm.
2. Published to MAC app format. Zipped up the folder and sent it to a MAC friend (thanks Dan), and it worked like a charm.
3. Published to *.mp4 format – and it still worked (as can be seen above)

So far I’m impressed. Next task is to learn how to add text captions to a project.