The Captivate Workflow

Captivate projects don't start with you firing up Captivate, capturing a bunch of stuff, and then editing the results in Captivate. Instead, think about the purpose of the capture, what needs to be captured, what assets need to be added to or created for the capture, and how the final product will be delivered. Captivate was designed to help you through this process.

The purpose of the capture is critical. There are three capture modes in Captivate (Figure 1.1), and each is designed to meet the unique needs of a capture's purpose:

• Demonstration In many respects, you can think of this mode as being noninteractive. The viewer watches the movie and learns how to complete a task. When you use the Demonstration mode, Captivate automatically adds the captions and inserts the highlight boxes where you click the mouse, and will also track mouse movement.

• Simulation This type of movie requires user involvement and usually tells the viewer, "OK, now you try it." This mode adds click boxes automatically where you click the mouse, captions indicating success or failure, and even captions with hints. What this mode does not do, however, is record the movement of the mouse.

• Training Training is the most complex mode of all. Though similar in many ways to the Simulation modesuccess and hint captions, no mouse-movement recordingit also requires both the trainer and the user to participate in the process. This is the mode in which questions are asked, and the user must answer them either though mouse clicks or text entry. It is also the mode in which you can send those responses to a Learning Management System (LMS) to be "graded."

Figure 1.1. The capture mode determines the tone and the approach to the entire development process.

After the capture is created, Captivate returns you to the Captivate work environment. This is where you can add sound, text, questions, video, and other content to each slide captured. You can also change the timing of each element on a slide and determine how it appears on the slide using special effects. In fact, if you have experience with Macromedia Flash MX 2004, you can even edit the slides in that application to take full advantage of its features.

You don't have to use Captivate to create content. If, for example, you use the tools in the MX Studio 2004Fireworks MX, Freehand MX, and Flash MX 2004you can create slide content ranging from movie controllers to Flash Video in those applications and easily add it to your Captivate presentation. In fact, you can create images, buttons, and other interface elements in most imaging and drawing software. Add to that the capability to import PowerPoint slides directly into Captivate, and you quickly realize there is a serious amount of power under Captivate's hood.

Finally, you need to determine the media to be used for the final movie. Captivate enables you to create content CDs, the Web, kiosks, users' computers, Breeze, Microsoft Word, and even email.