Captivate 3 and Flash CS3 under Vista 64

[JohnDoe40]

Hello,

I'm having a problem with using Adobe Captivate 3 and Adobe Flash CS3 in tandem to get my Captivate project in a file format accepted by online video sharing sites such as YouTube. Since Captivate 3 does not have an option to export to .avi or any other accepted movie file format, I thought that I would export the Captivate project to Flash, and then export it to the avi file format through Flash. However, whenever I select "File>Export>Project To>Flash CS3," I get the following error in Flash:

quote:

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The import did not finish because an unknown error occurred

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I could not find any resources that pertained to my particular problem. I am using Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, with a different directory structure than XP. In the Adobe Developer Center article " Exporting your Adobe Captivate project to Flash," it references a certain "RDMFISTUB.DLL" file that I cannot locate on my system. Could this problem be caused by incompatibilities with Vista?

My end goal is to post a Captivate project comprised of mostly full-motion recording to YouTube. If there is another way to do this that doesn't involve installing any 3rd-party software, I'm open to that as well.

Thank you

[CatBandit]

RDMFISTUB.DLL will be found in ~

C:\Program Files \ Adobe \ Adobe Captivate 3\

Of course, that Tech article was written to help in exporting Captivate 2 files to either Flash 8 or Flash MX (2004), so whether or not it will address your issue is in question.

But the real "catch" to helping you is that " doesn't involve installing any 3rd-party software" thing. I don't know sic em about YouTube (and hope not to know more in the future) but I can tell you that in the AdobeWorld, the FLV file format is the best among the best for streaming video.

So my answer would be to look into a software that converts SWF to FLV. Problem is, it would require installing 3rd-party software to do the conversion (Google " SWF to FLV"), since you are having trouble using the conversion abilities of Flash CS3. Have you tried "backing" into it? That is, instead of exporting Captivate to Flash, have you tried importing the Captivate project to an existing Flash stage? Just a thought...

Welcome to the User Community, A~boo!
.

[JohnDoe40]

Thanks for the help, Larry. Whatever the problem was with Captivate and Flash, it's partially fixed. Now, if I have the "unknown error" problem, I open and close Captivate and Flash a couple times, which does the trick. Unfortunately, I have a new problem with Flash.

When I have a Captivate project that is *all* full-motion recordings (with microphone audio recordings) and I export it to Flash and then export it to .mov (my new format of choice), I get the full-motion recordings, with no sound. This lack of sound is a problem, but not a show-stopper.The much bigger obstacle is that when I export a Captivate project that incorporates full-motion recordings with static slides displaying a text caption to Flash and then to .mov, I lose the full-motion recordings: they are replaced with a blank white or black screen (whatever the background color is set to be). The audio is gone too. I don't know what is causing this, but I would really appreciate any help you could lend me concerning this.Once again, thank you for your previous assistance,

[CatBandit]

You said...

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The much bigger obstacle is that when I export a Captivate project that incorporates full-motion recordings with static slides displaying a text caption to Flash and then to .mov, I lose the full-motion recordings: they are replaced with a blank white or black screen (whatever the background color is set to be). The audio is gone too. I don't know what is causing this, but I would really appreciate any help you could lend me concerning this.

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I don't have a solution - maybe someone else here does - but would offer an observation ...

Keeping in mind that I avoid monkeying with my own Captivate projects in Flash because of the various inconsistencie, some of which you have seen ... I am hopeful that the Captivate team does something to address the handling of full-motion slides. We all know that they are created as AVI clips which are then converted to SWF as separate slides, so it seems logical to me that there must be a way to offer the source, that is, the AVI or a FLA either of which would then be handled separately inside Flash (for those who like to do their tinkering in that environment).

In the meantime, you might try to change the timing of the (errant) full-motion slide a bit. Like, perhaps add or subtract a tenth of a second to it or otherwise change its properties so that the import doesn't end up as a blank. Just thinking out loud in trouble-shooting mode... come to think of it, when the project is published to SWF/HTM, each full-motion slide is published as a separate SWF file. Would it be possible to publish the project, then try to bring that SWF back into Captivate as an animation? It's late here and I'm getting into fuzzy-thinking time, so if that doesn't make sense, it wouldn't surprise me.

[JohnDoe40]

quote:

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Originally posted by: CatBandit
when the project is published to SWF/HTM, each full-motion slide is published as a separate SWF file. Would it be possible to publish the project, then try to bring that SWF back into Captivate as an animation? It's late here and I'm getting into fuzzy-thinking time, so if that doesn't make sense, it wouldn't surprise me.

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Yes - this is an established technique to import the individual swfs of the full-motion clips to the Captivate storyboard (or whatever it's called), then exporting generates only one swf. Hey! That's a good idea. Then maybe I can export that to Flash. I'll try that and get back to you. Thanks for the help.