I first learned to use Adobe Captivate during the completion of my master’s degree. At the time, the school offered a fully licensed copy of Captivate 7. I continued using Captivate for my freelance projects. This year I had the opportunity to attend my first Adobe eLearning conference. It was amazing! I’m looking forward to attending next year’s event! At this year’s conference, Adobe previewed the 360 and the interactive video feature for the next newest version of Captivate. So when I saw the invitation to beta test the prerelease, I immediately responded. Below is my review of the interactive video feature in Captivate 2019.
A Little Background
During my master’s program, one of our assignments was to create a project in Captivate and save it as a video. The topic I choose was “Getting Started with LinkedIn.” Since the content within the original video is three years old, I decided to update it and pear it down. The video represents the first part of creating a new profile in LinkedIn. Keep in mind, the video does not go into the nitty-gritty details of the process but gives a brief overview. The first video highlights the overlay slide feature. There are two types of overlays. Content slide and knowledge check/quiz question slides. Part 2 highlights the bookmark feature in Captivate.
Part 1
The voiceover was created using Amazon’s AWS Polly. The recording was done using Screencast-o-matic.
Part 2
In this brief video, I highlight the bookmark feature. Here I purposely answered the knowledge check question incorrectly. In doing so, I was taken back to the beginning of the video so I can review the content again. This is another way to branch content within a video course.
Thoughts
Overall, I think this feature has great potential. I recently completed a project where I created three video courses. For this project, I used Captivate 9. The video was added to one slide and the knowledge check questions were on three additional slides. These question appeared once the learner completed watching the entire video. All the videos were one hour in length. With the addition of the interactive video feature in Captivate 2019, I could add those knowledge check questions at certain points in the video thereby creating a mental break for the learners. My only point and a suggestion to the engineering team has to do with the bookmark feature.
Rather than scrolling back and forth through the timeline to see your bookmarks, the properties inspector should have a section that lists all of the bookmarks added on the timeline. This would save a great deal of time. As I see it, the interactive feature is a game changer!
Sorry, but apparently my logic is not clear to you …. maybe later.
Do you mean that the Bookmarks should be similar to the Fluid Boxes setup for which you showed a screenshot? That is a bit confusing.
As a workaround to see all the bookmarks: the command ‘Jump to Bookmark’ is available both as simple command (tab Actions ) and in the Advanced Actions dialog box. There you have a dropdown list with all the bookmarks (labeled please).
I should be able to find my bookmarks in the properties inspector rather than having to scrub through the timeline. With fluid boxes, I can click on the box I want and edit it.
Fluid Boxes are not linked to the timeline, they are fixed for the slide. A video has only one slide, and the bookmarks are linked to the timeline, same way as pausing points and objects are linked to the timeline. I don’t know which Properties you should want to have the bookmarks showing up? I really do not see the logic of that. Timeline panel is in all Captivate files the most important panel. For each interactive video I would immediately create a TOC with all the bookmarks to jump to. Maybe that would be a better suggestion (since bookmarks co not fit in Properties nor in TIming Properties): automatic TOC for an interactive video where all bookmarks show up?