Video-based training and Captivate

Question

I'm new to Captivate. My company focuses on film production
and we have been asked to create video-based training modules for a
large customer. We do all of our production work in Final Cut and
then we transcode videos to Flash (.flv).
We intend to create online courses that are video-based ( we
will add audio voiceovers) plus we will want to add still images
with audio and text (assessments, additional content, etc.).
Finally, we will need to upload our modules into a tier 1 LMS
(Saba, SumTotal, Oracle iLearning, etc.).
Is Captivate the tool for us?

Answer 1

Overall, Captivate is probably a good choice for you,
especially if you're already publishing your materials as FLV.
That said, you should probably be aware of the following when
using Captivate in the manner you've described:
1) Per some recent forum posts, a few folks are having
trouble getting FLV files to play all the way through. The video is
being cut off at the end for some reason. I suspect it's a case of
user error when configuring the slide timing, but you might want to
do a search of the forums and see if those folks ever got things
resolved.
2) Audio seems to be hit or miss in Captivate. Some folks
have problems, others have none. It seems mostly to do with how the
audio is brought into Captivate (recorded directly in the product
vs brought in as externally-recorded WAV or MP3 files) and where it
is placed (inserted at the slide level, or attached to a specific
button, such as a "Play Audio" button. I don't use audio in my
projects so I can't comment on the actual details, but again, a
search of the forums might be helpful.
3) Captivate publishes FLV files to the web as external files
that are dynamically loaded when the content is accessed. This
could potentially be a problem if the LMS doesn't allow a SCO to
consist of more than one file (seems unlikely, but worth mentioning
just in case).
4) Captivate offers a preloader that ensures enough of the
movie has downloaded prior to starting playback (and the preload
percentage is customizable if you own Flash). However, I don't know
if the preloader takes embedded videos into account, which could
impact your user experience if your movies are big and take a long
time to download.
5) Captivate advertises compatibility with SCORM-compliant
LMS products, but the published files often require tweaking to
work with a particular LMS. The forums will be helpful in this
regard, but there may also be some trial-and-error finding the
exact changes you need to make to support your specific LMS.
6) Captivate does not support multi-SCO SCORM manifests. If
you plan on deploying a multi-SCO course via SCORM, you'll need to
use a 3rd-party tool to create the manifest file. There's a number
of free and commercial products available that support both SCORM
1.2 and SCORM 1.3 (2004). A fairly comprehensive list can be found
here:
http://adlcommunity.net/mod/data/view.php?id=201
Hopefully, other folks will chime in and offer assurances for
some of the issues raised above, but those are the main issues that
I've seen in the Captivate forums that might affect you.