Hello,
I'm currently using a trial version of Captivate, trying to see if the software will even work for us. Our company hosts outside speakers for continuing professional education lectures. I will be video taping these lectures with a Canon GL2. What we would like to see is the video of the lecturer playing in sync with their powerpoint (timings recorded IN Powerpoint by the lecturer) as two separate, SMALL windows. (See image below for an example of what I'm really trying to emulate.) The PPTX imports as many different captivate slides. If I was able to resize all the PPT slides into a smaller view, this would be fine as the video is set to play "rest of project" and so, each would maintin a reduced space within the frame as the Captivate slides advance. But the PP slides import as full frame and the video simply covers part of the slide. I tried resaving the PPTX at a smaller size (96PPI) and importing. I've tried up-sizing the entire project so that the imported PPTX will be smaller. It doesn't work - PPT still goes full frame. And anyway, this isn't really a great solution since the best you can do is make the PP slides go to one or another corner (vs. being able to resize as needed for an effective balance of the two frames-video & powerpoint). Is this possible?
Another wrinkle is that since the video and powerpoint slides will be synced BEFORE they're ever inported into Captivate, the user needs a way to pause BOTH if needed, instead of just one. Disabling the skin on the video would prevent them from pausing the video and cause the PPT to get out of sync. However, from my test, it appears that the pause button for the entire presentation at the bottom of the playback window does not pause the video AND powerpoint slides, just the powerpoint.
If what I'm wanting to do can't be done with Captivate, can someone suggest an alternative software that will work for me? I really don't want to go the route of editting a split screen video. The file size will be unnecessarily big for the Powerpoint 1/2 of the frame. Plus, it's not very attractive. PLEASE HELP!
Thanks for your post. I found this tutorial and sucessfully integrated video into the TOC. However, using video in the table of contents like this is not as appealing to my eye, as it’s very small. I understand that Adobe Captivate is very suitable for people designing slides with video placement in mind from the very start. However, I think the software engineers have simply not completely thought through other scenarios like what my company needs to do – pre-existing PowerPoint presentations synchronized with new video. Hopefully this will be addressed in subsequent updates. In the meantime, I will probably not be purchasing Captivate, and will instead have to go with the MUCH more pricey encoder option, as shown in the image above. Very unfortunate.
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