This is week-old news but worth a quick post to refresh the notice that a patch has been released for Captivate 8, bringing it up to 8.0.1.242. Assuming you have a subscription to CP8 (it’s difficult to get a license that’s not a subscription), fire-up Captivate and click Help > Updates. Continue reading First Captivate 8 Patch Released
Category Archives: Multimedia
Adobe Max Online, Creative Cloud Updates
Adobe Max starts today and the Keynotes are being webcast!
http://max.adobe.com/sessions/max-online
They’re having some connectivity issues, likely due to heavy traffic, but coming in well here so far…
- Day One keynote: Creativity on the Cutting Edge: Monday, Oct 6, 9:30–11:30am PT
- Day Two keynote: Community Inspires Creativity: Tuesday, Oct 7, 10–11:30am PT
Check out the Adobe Max Blog for timely updates. One major topic is the latest Creative Cloud updates. That blog post covers the highlights, including new Adobe Apps:
- Illustrator Draw: “An all-new app that reinvents the best of Adobe Ideas, letting you work with familiar tools and features in a modern, streamlined interface.”
- Photoshop Sketch: “Draw with new expressive brushes as well as custom brushes, and send sketch artwork to Photoshop as a PSD file…”
- Lightroom Mobile: “View comments and favorites in Lightroom mobile that clients, friends, or family leave on the photos you’ve shared online in Lightroom on the web.”
- Creative Cloud Market: “A collection of high-quality, curated content that’s free to Creative Cloud members.”
Adobe’s Edge-y HTML5 Development Tools
With Flash being increasingly dismissed for many web projects, Adobe needed an answer to replace at least some of that functionality with a tool that used HTML/JS…resulting in the Edge suite of tools.
Here’s Wikipedia’s entry on the Edge tools. I’m not sure the overview paragraph is terribly accurate, but it’s a good reference page overall, outside Adobe’s site.
That said, Flash isn’t entirely out of the game. With CreateJS integrated, Flash can output to HTML5 Canvas, creating solid images, charts, and animations. I consider this the beginning of the Flash IDE transformation. Until it moves further, however, the Edge tools provide a lot of the otherwise missing HTML functionality.
ADA/508/504 and Video Accessibility
A little old, but still highly relevant, from the November 2013 Streaming Media West conference came a session titled “Best Practices for Implementing Accessible Video Captioning” . Representatives from Dell, T-Mobile, and Google/YouTube discussed video captioning, mobile video, and video translation.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990) covers federal, state, and local jurisdictions, and applies to a wide range of domains, including employment, public entities, telecommunications, and places of public accommodation.
Project Narration Guidelines (for eLearning, or most anything)
If your eLearning project calls for narration – whether to enhance the on-screen content, provide navigation instruction, to address 508/Accessibility requirements, or just to have an extra bit of media within your piece (the suitability of all to be ideally determined in your instructional design phase) – there are essentially two approaches: Record it yourself (or ‘in-house’) or Hire a professional.
In-house narration can be worthwhile for a variety of reasons. For example, if a faculty member or subject-matter expert is well-known, having that SME record the narration can lend some weight to the overall engagement and perceived validity of the course; or if you need to work out the timing of various media elements, recording a temporary ‘scratch’ track can certainly help with production and beta reviews of the product before expenses are incurred using professional talent.
Professional narration does usually add a cost to the projects, of course, but with proper management of the script and resources, it doesn’t have to be expensive. The advantages of clean, clear, and properly-enunciated narration can only help improve the overall quality of the project.
If you work with outside, professional narrators – or even experienced narrators in-house – Rebecca Haugh (a narrator we’ve used often) has published a solid set of 5 Tips for eLearning Voice Recording. And of course, those are solid considerations to keep in mind when you are recording narration internally with less-experienced folks.
Having developed, managed, and even recorded untold numbers of narratives for eLearning projects, here are a few additional guidelines (some of which Rebecca touches on as well):
Continue reading Project Narration Guidelines (for eLearning, or most anything)
New Recipe (CP7 and Video)
In case you missed it, we’ve got a new (and the first) sample piece up on the Recipes page. this example was created in Captivate 7 to demonstrate two concepts:
- How to do a simple ‘clickspot’ (or ‘hotspot’) overlay on video; using a ‘slide video’ on the timeline with clickspots placed at various points, pausing the video, to allow users to interact with the piece.
- Showing how an MP4 placed as an ‘Event video’ allows video-specific controls which will work on both desktop (SWF) and mobile (HTML5) output. Event videos in CP are the only way to show video-specific controls, but you cannot then accurately time other timeline events with those videos as they have their own controls.
Head over to the Recipes section to check it out!