Slide loses animation

[Guest]

Whenever i go back to any slide on my published flash player training, the slide tends to forget the animation that has been used. The objects dont appear the way they should and come all at once foregoing the animations applied. any suggestions? i am using adobe captivate cs5

[RodWard]

Are you referring to SWF animations created in Flash and inserted into Captivate, or to objects in Captivate that have animations applied to them?

Can you be a little clearer about the nature of this issue?  Perhaps give us an example? or show a screenshot?

[Guest]

Thanks for the extremely quick response. Appreciate it. (Sorry wouldnt be able to give a screenshot:confidentiality purpose. Surely you understand)

i am referring to objects in Captivate that have animations applied to them.

So essentially we are required to put a 60 slide presentation in Adobe Captivate. We have imported the entire presentation in Captivate. The animations and the required timing of each animation has been done in the MS Powerpoint presentation itself (as on importing adobe captivate provides the only a single bar to set the time in the Timeline).

After that we exported it to flash player (.exe format). On playing the file whenever we go back to a slide the animations dont appear again.

PS:

Is it a good option to export the entire presentation? or should we paste each object on each slide separately?i guess this will provide more flexibility in terms of setting the time for each object. But will lead to less animation options available?

[RodWard]

OK.  Now I understand a bit more.  So you've applied animations in PPT before importing the PPT deck into Captivate.  You're not really talking about 'objects in Captivate' like text captions, highlight boxes, or images, etc.  You're referring to objects in PPT (with animations applied in PPT) that are brought in as individual PPT slides.

From my understanding of how the PPT import process works, you end up with each PPT slide being converted into something a bit like a chunk of video embedded on each corresponding Captivate slide.  You cannot edit the objects and animations on this slide like you would other native Cp objects that had Cp animations applied.  To edit the PPT slide objects, you have to use the options to roundtrip edit to PPT and then back to Cp.

I think you're going to find that your options are quite limited as far as resolving this issue while ever you use PPT as your starting point.  If you were to build these slides from scratch in Captivate and use Captivate's animation options instead, then (depending on the specific animation effects you're after) you might have better luck trying to get them to work when jumping back to a previous slide.  It sounds a bit like with your current project the PPT animations only play once per session and they remember the fact that they've reached their end point.

[Guest]

Ok. Great. Thats exactly the kind of answer that we were looking for. Again thanks for the prompt advice. Appreciate it immensely.

Ok but one thing that I have noticed is that Adobe Captivate doesnt really provide a wide range of animations. (Does it??Maybe something that I am not aware of?) I think MS Powerpoint provides a bigger range of animations (the kind that we need). Is there a way to work around this? Is something like this possible??

We have felt a little limited with the type of animations available. Is there a way around this?Maybe animations like objects "flying in" or something like that??

[RodWard]

You are correct that PowerPoint would currently have a wider range of object animations and animation options than Captivate does.  However, if you purchased Captivate as part of the E-learning Suite then you also have Flash, which has almost limitless options as far as animating objects.  You can also define your own custom Effect animations in Flash and import them into Captivate as XML definitions to get closer to the effect that you want.

So Captivate is more limited in one way and more powerful in another.  It depends what you were trying to achieve.

Which specific animations did you want?  You can certainly have objects fly in with standard Captivate Effects.  Have you only noticed the Fade in and Fade out transitions but were perhaps unaware of the Effects panel?

[Guest]

Yes we are only aware about the Fade in and Fade out tranisitions. Completely unaware of the Effects panel. Could you guide us on that maybe?

PS: Correction!!! We are using Adobe Captivate 4 and not Adobe Captivate CS5 as mentioned above wrongly by mistake.

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

If you're on Captivate 4 then you will not have the Effects panel.  Your options are limited to the transitions available such as Fade in and Fade out.

If you have Flash, there is nothing to prevent you from creating SWF objects with sophisticated animations and then inserting them into Captivate.  That's the way I used to do just about everything before Cp5 introduced Effects.  Now I only use Flash for things Captivate cannot yet do, like masking.

[Guest]

Great. That provides immense clarity.

So you would recommend upgrading to Adobe Captivate CS 5.5 right?

[RodWard]

Yes and no.  If I were able to wait a little while longer, I'd actually recommend you upgrade to Captivate 5.5 as soon as the release date for Captivate 6 is announced with a free upgrade from Cp 5.5.  Then you'd get the best of both worlds.

[Guest]

ok. and that would be?how long?when is Captivate 6 expected to release? We are working on a tight project timeline here.

[RodWard]

I cannot tell you the release date.  (I don't know it.)

However, if you search the Adobe website you will find indicators about their usual release timings and could probably figure it out to within a few weeks that way.

If you have a deadline that forces you to make a decision right now, and you stand to lose more than the cost of purchase if you delay, then by all means jump in and buy.  If you haven't as yet used a Trial version of Captivate 5.5 you could always wait as long as you can and then install that to buy yourself another 30 days grace.  Maybe before the trial runs out the release date would be announced.  It's your money, right?