Intro

Whenever possible I use AI when I expect to save time. Not being a native English speaker, and maintaining a blog where I often publish live examples of Captivate’s output, it helps me designing text-based content for those examples while providing some keywords. In Photoshop and Illustrator I always have been enjoying the AI-based workflows. I love Adobe Express for features like creating a speaking avatar based on written text, and Firefly for graphics.

Warning

More recently everyone has heard about ChatGPT, and is using one or more engines to find more elaborate answers to questions than is possible with old Google.

I often chat with Copilot in Edge. I write this short post to express a warning. I have tried out other engines based on ChatGPT but I like the fact that the answers here offer the URLs of the used resources. Although you may have to offer specifications to get the answer you want, some chatting will provide what you want …. EXCEPT in case of a drastic makeover like what happens with the change from previous Captivate Classic to the present New Captivate, now in version 12.2. In many cases you’ll get a wrong answer because the resource database available world wide for this new version is very small. Copilot will often find only support resources for previous versions and will base answers on them. If you don’t see the URLs to check, this is very confusing and misleading. Here are two examples I checked out for this blog post. I mentioned explicitly the version number as context in the question.  I post the examples in the sequence I used. As expected (look at the second answer) the agent being AI it learned from its first big error.  

Questions

Question 1: Does Adobe Captivate version 12 have text to speech?

This is a screenshot of the first answer. But this is the completely outdated answer you would have gotten:

Of course I knew that this feature was not available at all. There are not even Slide Notes, and NeoSpeech died.

The used resources were all official: Adobe Captivate forum, eLearning community and the official Help documentation. 

After some re-education (my bad…) through chat a more appropriate answer was given.  I asked than for another question and learned that the re-education was not adequate.

Question Two: How to use Bookmarks in Captivate 12.2?

I have been posting blog posts about this topic, so it would clarify how up to date Copilot's database is. FYI: my blog is amongst their resources. Just try to ask anything about the now lost Shared Actions in former versions.

Answer below probably due to my 're-education'?:

Copilot still apologizes for the first wrong answer, but apparently is still confused about the version numbers and now tells me that this is another missing feature. Whereas I already posted three blog posts explicitly about Bookmarks in New Captivate (one is waiting for moderation here as well since weeks).  So, I continued the re-education, sent two URLs for two posts. Result is still bit annoying, because there are still some links to the official documents about older versions where bookmarks as frame navigation are limited to video slides only:

This happened after my detailed explanation about the changes with bookmarks from Captivate Classic to New Captivate. Only then a full search has seemed to happen.

Conclusion

Careful with answers from ChatGPT about software problems, especially with a new version like Captivate. When I was a student, I always preferred professors who did freely tell not to be able to answer immediately, but would be looking it up. ChatGPT too often proclaims to know an answer to every question, which is clearly not the case.

What is your opinion?

Intro

This is a second post about bookmarks in New and Classic Captivate. I hope you have read the introduction, where I explain the terminology and show a Captivate tutorial with examples of static and dynamic bookmarks:

Intro to Bookmarking

New Captivate - version 12 - has only static bookmarks, but they are available on all content slides, with the exception of question and score slides. Captivate Classic has static bookmarks only on slides with slide video. However using micro-navigation (based on available system variables) you can mimick bookmarks on all slides, and also create dynamic bookmarks. Dynamic bookmarks are created on runtime and not available in New Captivate.

In this first part of bookmarking, I treat the topic from its original view: to navigate within a project on the level of frames.

New Captivate also has the possibility to use Bookmarks as events to trigger an (inter)action. That is an improvement over Captivate Classic which has only the Delay command to mimick that behavior. Again, this is limited to static bookmarks. I will publish some examples of bookmark-triggers in a second part.

Example in New Captivate

Scenario

After the title slide you’ll see:

1. A list of explanations of the Steps. Appearance of each step is controlled by the user with a Continue button This slide uses bookmarks for that reason, but the original idea to use those bookmarks as navigation target from the last slide did not work. I am waiting on an answer from the team, logged a bug. Their use as event trigger has been used, but will be explained in a later blog.
2. A video slide (slide video). On top you’ll find three buttons which allow to jump to bookmarks within the same slide. One of the buttons is the Replay button.

Example project

Workflow step-by-step

Bug warning

When you open a project which has a slide video slide where the video duration is longer than the default 3 seconds duration of the video placeholder, the time ruler will disappear and be replaced by an emoticon:

Luckily it is easy to solve, just move the zoom slider and the time ruler will reappear:

Step 1: Create bookmarks

If you know the exact time for the bookmark, you can move the play head near that time. For a video I recommend to use the Play button to get the exact timing. Pause/play using the space bar as toggle is still possible, but not always in a consistent way.

Click the bookmark bar to insert a bookmark which looks like a black diamond. I strongly recommend to replace the generative name by a custom one which will make it easier to find the target bookmarks. Just double-click the proposed name and edit it. In this screenshot you see a bookmark near the start of the slide, which will be used to create a Replay button:

Beware: it can happen that while editing the name that the focus switches from the Properties to the Interactions. In that panel it looks like you forgot to define an interaction for the bookmark. This is a bit confusing because it looks like 'missing'. However a bookmark used as target for micro-navigation doesn't need an interaction. The interaction panel shows all the bookmarks on a slide (bookmarks belong to the group of Slide events) with their timing.

It is possible to move a bookmark by dragging. You can delete a bookmark using the right-click menu.

Step 2: navigation buttons

On top of the video slide I added 3 buttons (it is the maximum in New Captivate within one interactive component). The button functions as trigger for the action 'Jump to bookmark xxxx'. Here is an example screenshot for Button 'Second':

The Replay button will get back to a bookmark at the start of the slide:

The Steps slide with the explanations has 5 bookmarks:

As you could read in the scenario, I meant to have 'Jump to Bookmark' as target bookmark from the video slide. But at this moment that is not working. The jump is replaced buy Go to Previous slide.  I hope this will be fixed soon.

You may wonder why there is a fifth bookmark at the end?  Its action is 'Go to Next Slide' to mimick the smooth transition to the next slide which was typical for all previous versions. Using the On Exit slide event is not working. I am not the only user to have found this workaround. Personallty I never have liked the PPT-like presentation playbar.

The other 4 bookmarks are using the frame event to trigger an interaction. In this first part I restrict to the bookmarks in their original meaning: as navigation targets.        

Comparison New/Classic

Advantage of New Captivate: you can use bookmarks on all content slides except quiz slides. 

For Classic Captivate bookmarks are limited to slides with Slide video.  For other slides you need 'micro-navigation'. Next blog post will explain the workaround by replacing the same scenario. I may provide the shared actions to mimick the bookmark navigation on non-video slides.

Intro

Interactive video is one of the new features in CP2019 (version 11). Over 10 years ago I did choose for Captivate because it had a lot of possibilities for interactivity in any cptx-project, Some users do think that 'interactive video' is the way to go, but to me it is a nice addition especially to make existing passive video a little bit more engaging. To avoid confusion, because already did see a lot of theoretical posts here that talk about normal interactive projects, not about interactive videos, I will continue to point at published cptx- projects as ‘interactive movies’ to show the difference with less interactive 'interactive video'. A standalone interactive video can be nice. However I honestly believe that the combination of interactive video slides with static interactive  slides in a cptx project is more powerful. Later on I will try to show with use cases what I mean. These tips are for 'interactive video' only. 

The first version of interactive video offers the possibility to insert:

• Bookmarks: which out of the box can be used with the new command ‘Jump to bookmark’ to realize some branching often based on answer to  knowledge check slides.
  
  
• Overlay content  slides: which appear at certain frames of the video on top of the video (can take up part of the screen, with  in a dimmed version of the video in the background). Most Captivate features can be used on those content slides, including advanced/shared actions.
  
  
• Overlay Knowledge Check slides: which are based on the quizzing master slides.  Their appearance is the same as for the content overlay slides. Scored quiz slides are not possible.Contrary to the overlay Quiz slides in a 360 slide, these Knowledge Check slide do honor the used theme, their style can be full controlled. However, you cannot use scored Quiz slides in overlay (which is possible in a 360 slide). 

I will post lin the future a full description of the timeline of interactive video slides, and line up the differences with a normal video. An interactive video is always a slide (synchronized) video, never an event video. Consequence: interactive video is not possible in a fluid box which can only support event video, nor in the state of a multistate object.

In this blog post, I’ll offer some tips for using and enhancing the present functionality of interactive video. I posted an interactive video, as illustration in this article . Explanation of the tips is based on that example, I recommend to watch it if you didn't had time yet.

Tips

Tip 1: Prepare Master Slides for Overlay slides

Interactive video supports two types of Overlay slides; Content overlay slides and Knowledge Check  overlay slides. Both types can have the same size as the project size, but I prefer to have a smaller size for the overlay slides, so that the video itself remains visible in the background (dimmed). That can be done by using a duplicate of the Blank slide, on which you insert a shape with a smaller size than the slide, as background for your content or questions. As with normal content master slides, you can create as many as you need.  Have a look at the 3 master slides used for the example video mentioned before:

Next to the Blank master slide you see two content master slides :

• OverlayTip: has a bubble shape, semi-transparent as background; the white space surrounding the shape will be ignored in the overlay and show the dimmed video.
  
  
• OverlayWarn: has a different shape, less transparent and also white surrounding space.

The Quiz master slide which I used is a duplicate of the MCQ... master slide. It is necessary to use such a duplicate because you need all the embedded objects with their functionality. I used a rectangular shape as background, not transparent.
Beware: 

1. use a non-responsive theme, because the Quizzing master slides in a Fluid Boxes theme have a setup with fluid boxes. 
   
   
2. when creating a slides based on this master slide, you need to choose Knowledge Check slides, because normal Quiz slides cannot be used as Overlay slides for an interactive video.

After insertion of 5 overlay content slides and one KC slide, the Filmstrip looks like this (watch the hierarchy symbolized by the smaller size of the overlay slides, and by the icons at the bottom). :

Tip 2:  No fixed duration but a Close button

To me Interactivity means to offer as much control as possible to the learner. Some need more time, some want to proceed quicker. That is why I don’t like the fixed duration for Overlay content slides - which is the default setting.  No problem for the Knowledge Check slides,  the Submit button (with a pausing point at 1,5secs) takes care of keeping the slide available as long as wanted. Same would be the case for a slide with a D&D interaction or when using an interactive learning interaction.

For the static content slides however you need to pause the slide. To achieve that with minimum effort,  I used a shape button on the two master slides OverlayTip and OverlayWarn.:Look at this screenshot, where the Close button is at the bottom left:

For shape buttons on a master slide, the pausing point visible at the end of the Timeline is just an indicator. It will not appear in the Timing Properties because smart master objects have no timing. However, in the default setup, the shape button will pause at the end of each slide, hence the indicator. Look under the Actions tab for the shape button on the master slide. 

The action triggered by the Success event of that button is very simple: ‘Continue‘, to release the paused playhead. Since the pausing point is at the end of each overlay content slide, it will close immediately and the video continues.

Tip 3: Information button

That button is available for the full duration of the project, from the second (video) slide on. . I described the workflow in an older post, which dates from  CP2017: Interactive Video Buttons but is still valid for the present version. It is a simple click/reveal button, which pauses the video and has a close button. That close button takes care of hiding the information and releasing the video playhead.

Tip 4: Navigation Menu

With the Menu button the learner has a TOC to bookmarks available, to review only parts of the video. I described my workflow in this post.

The menu button has a custom state, which is used to close the menu (similar to the Pause/play button of the example video). It triggers this action:

The menu items are hyperlinks triggering advanced actions, which jump to the wanted bookmark and close the menu. As mentioned in the past, for some weird reason the option 'Execute Shared Action' is not available for hyperlinks, or I would have used a Shared action instead of duplicate Advanced actions.