Audio workflow - Best practices?

[sean_slavin]

For the past week, I've been working diligently creating lots of content with Captivate. I have a question about workflow. Since Captivate captures individual screenshots to generate the movie, what is the best way to lay down audio? For example, I may have several slides dealing with some configuration of the software that takes place through a right-click context menu. Each click to get through that menu is a separate slide. Is there a way to get the audio to span several slides or do I just put a short audio clip on each one?

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

I'm not sure if it's necessarily "Best practice", but Captivate normally likes to have the audio narration at the slide level.

However, if you have a few slides where it doesn't make sense to do this, note that you can record a longer audio clip (maybe on a blank slide) then assign the audio to the slide where it should begin. If the clip is longer than the slide, Captivate will offer a dialog allowing you to choose how the clip will be split. You would then choose the option where it simply spills into subsequent slides.

Cheers... Rick

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[sean_slavin]

Thanks for the quick reply Rick.

Haivng the audio at the slide level makes total sense to me. I think I'm just putting too much onto each slide and I'm still trying to figure out the best approach in using Captivate. Looks like I'm going to have a long weekend sitting in front of a microphone...

[Janis_Taylor]

I have had the same question as you Sean. Another option is to have some slides with no audio. So on slide x you could say, 'Next we're going to populate the widget field," then leave off any audio on the 2 or 3 slides that demonstrate that feature.

I find I have to write the whole darn script out word-for-freekin'-word too. It takes a long time, but the result is good quality.