6 Replies Latest reply: Jul 9, 2012 7:31 AM by rygaar RSS

    Recorded Actions and Batch jobs

    rygaar Community Member

      Photoshop has an Actions panel feature that allows you to record and save a set of commands (eg: resize an image to 400 x 600, then turn it black & white).  Anytime you want to perform the same set of commands, just select and run the saved Action.  In addition, Photoshop has a Batch jobs feature that allows you to select a directory of files and run the saved action on all files in the directory.  In this way, you could resize a thousand images to 400 x 600 and turn them all black & white with one click.

       

      Does Captivate have any similar capability?  I have about 3,000 swf files and I wish to set the preloader percentage on all of them to the same value. I would hate to open, edit, save, and close the files manually one at a time.  If this feature does not exist, can you guys think of an efficient way to accomplish the task?

       

      I have Captivate 5 but can upgrade if necessary.

       

      Thanks for the help

        • 1. Re: Recorded Actions and Batch jobs
          Captiv8r CommunityMVP

          Hi there

           

          Sorry, but Captivate does not have such a thing. The only thing that I can think of is to use something like Macro Express to automate some of it.

           

          http://www.macros.com

           

          Cheers... Rick

           

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          • 2. Re: Recorded Actions and Batch jobs
            rygaar Community Member

            I meant 3,000 cpt and cptx files.  Thanks Rick.  I've never heard of Macro Express but I'll look into it.

            • 3. Re: Recorded Actions and Batch jobs
              RodWard CommunityMVP

              Since you mention that you have both CPT and CPTX files it might be worth mentioning that your goal of just opening them, chaning the preloader percentage before save and close again might not work out as planned. 

               

              Have you considered the following issues?

               

              Are you intending to open the CPT files in the same version of Captivate that created them, or were you thinking of upgrading them to a later version such as Cp5.5?  If so, you'll need to do more than just change the preloader percentage.  You'll also need to change the path to the preloader itself since each version of Captivate is installed in a different directory in Program Files. 

               

              Were all of the CPT projects set up as AS3 with all AS3 components, or were some of them AS2 and therefore would need to be reviewed and tested to make sure upgrading to a Cp5x version did not have other impacts?  Projects that were set up as AS2 would need to change preloaders, skins, and any animations over to AS3 before the upgrade would be successful.

               

              CPT to CPTX files will also experience font size issues since the font rendering technology changed in Cp5x.  So you'll probably need to go through those projects and fix a lot of issues in text captions.

               

              And another one to watch out for:  After upgrading projects from CPT to CPTX the Continue button on the Quiz Results will often cease to work unless you remove and replace the Quiz Results slide.

               

              This is not a complete list of potential upgrade issues.  What I'm trying to sound here is a warning that, unless you use exactly the same version of Captivate that created them, making any changes to these files could turn into a much bigger job than you hope.  There could be weeks of work involved trawling through each project file one by one checking for issues.

              • 4. Re: Recorded Actions and Batch jobs
                rygaar Community Member

                Great points RodWard.  A batch process would still save me loads of time since about 2,500 of the files are CPTX.  If I could get them out of the way through an automated process, I would only have to go through 500 projects instead of 3,000 manually. 

                 

                If you had to run through the 2,500 files yourself, can you think of a better solution than the idea Rick gave me?

                 

                Thanks for pointing out the conversion issues; I'll be careful.

                • 5. Re: Recorded Actions and Batch jobs
                  RodWard CommunityMVP

                  No.  Rick's suggestion of using a macro engine to perform the steps is the best solution I can think of.  I'd recommend that you do a small batch of ten or twenty files to begin with and then test them thoroughly for issues before committing to doing the entire set.  Hopefully you'll catch any issues that might mean disaster.

                   

                  However, now that Captivate has been around for a number of years, the fact that circumstances like yours exist (needing to make changes across thousands of project files) I think there's a good use case for including some kind of batch processing in future versions of Cp.

                   

                  I'd recommend you log this as an enhancement request.

                  • 6. Re: Recorded Actions and Batch jobs
                    rygaar Community Member

                    Perhaps incredibly, I actually did log it as a feature request back in 2010.