Captain Captivate

A New Direction

Posted on 10. Jan, 2010 by captivatehero.

Happy 2010!

Well it’s been awhile since my last post. I’m truly sorry that I have not been keeping up  - there’s a backlog of cool article ideas I can’t wait to share. I will get to them, but they will not be in written form. More on that in a bit.

Over the last three months there has been many changes happening with my company Lodestone Digital. For those of you who are not familiar with Lodestone - we operate Adobe Authorized Training Centers across the USA that focus on corporations, creative firms, government agencies and higher education. A majority of these classes are delivered in the classroom, and some are delivered via Lodestone Live - our online training offering. The way that we deliver courses is evolving, and that of course had my FULL attention.

There is a fundamental change happening in education fueled by a convergence of delivery technology, social media, and online video. This is at all levels K-12, higher ed, and professional adult classes. I have immersed myself over the past 3 months with this opportunity, and with my team at Lodestone have come up with a new training model that changes everything we do. Our focus has always been to empower you to be creative and have more fun with software  - now we have a new way of making it happen. You will see a lot more video from Lodestone on the web, and in this blog.

Lodestone will be making an announcement at the beginning of February that will spell everything out, and I can’t wait to share it with you.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Josh

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Captivate 3 and FLV Video - Part 2

Posted on 21. Oct, 2008 by captivatehero.

This is in response to an earlier post about .FLV video in Captivate 3. I wanted to share with you a post that was made up on a private Captivate board by Jonathan Turkle, VP at Envisiontel. I think this confirms my suspicions about large amounts of Flash video.

I have had several occasions where customers have asked me to take a series of  20 .flv videos and turn it into DVD style on-line experience with a menu of various chapters or video modules that the user can be selected form different slides in a non-linear random access manner. When the video slide is finished playing the viewer is taken back to a main menu or home screen

After a great deal of time exploring this issue in Captivate 3, I learned that Captivate is designed to cache embedded movies in slides in a linear fashion in the order or the slides in the project. This means that beyond slide four or five the user must wait an interminable time for the video to load because it must cache the previous slide videos first. Is it not possible to have Captivate call an .flv slide videos without waiting for all the other slide videos to cache first?

The only work around to eliminate the extremely long video caching process has been to break up what should have been one Captivate project in to four Captivate projects with no more than 5 video slides in the project.

As I dig deeper into this topic it seems that large amounts of video in Captivate is a problem - hopefully this is addressed with any future versions of Captivate.

There have also been comments by many people about not even being able to play back .FLV video at all. This might be a server MIME type issue, but I’m looking for confirmation on that.

So it looks like if you are doing a video intensive project - stream your video. This looks like the only solution a this point. Now I have yet to speak with anyone who has implemented streaming video in Captivate 3, so if you have tested these waters please comment.

The Captain will continue to investigate this problem!

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Captivate 3 and FLV Video

Posted on 24. Sep, 2008 by captivatehero.

A fellow Captivate user was having problems with FLV video playing correctly on the web. The situation involved FLV videos appearing after a wrong answer in a captivate quiz. The set-up of the file was as follows:

What a great interaction: The user would answer the quiz question and if there was wrong answer feedback - they would see a video. If the answer was correct they would continue to the next quiz question. Each of the videos were set to Progressive download, and all seemed well while testing on the local machine. (I’m sure many of you can see where this is going already.) Then once the file was uploaded to the LMS - users experienced a system freeze, or the video would not play. They tried everything to figure this one out - changing the order of the videos in the slides, pre-loading videos, and even using javascript to open the video in a new browser window. etc. Nothing really worked they way they wanted it to, and when videos where placed in sequential slides - the problem was worse.

This is not the first time that I have encountered users having problems with FLV videos in Captivate 3. Here are some other issues I have seen in message boards:

• I have 20 FLV videos that are 2-3 minutes long - one video per slide. After about the 3rd or 4th video they stop playing.
• The audio is not working correctly, or the audio in the video plays too soon
• The videos just don’t play - period.

Wow. What a let down to know that you can put great looking video in a Captivate presentation, but then when the testing starts - it all heads south fast.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there may be an issue with the way Captivate is unloading the videos from memory - or better yet - Captivate is not unloading the videos from memory at all. I have yet to run across problems with streaming FLV’s, but most Captivate users don’t have the luxury of a streaming server - so you don’t hear about streaming server issues too often.

If you have had any problems using FLV videos in Captivate 3 - I would love to hear your story. Please make comments here about your video experience.

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