I have been using Adobe Captivate 5 in a real-life production project now for the last couple of weeks. I’m about half-way finished and thought I would post my findings and impression so far.
Using Adobe Captivate 5 for real:
I have been in the Beta test group for Adobe Captivate 5 and been through many different releases so I am pretty well aquainted with the new user interface and functions. However testing a software product in a beta test process is different from actually using it in a real-life project.
The first week I didn’t feel as productive as when I am using Adobe Captivate 5 because I had to get used to working in the new environment. I had to look for objects, buttons etc. since they are totally different from Adobe Captivate 4. However, after a week or so I feel pretty much at home in the Adobe Captivate 5 environment and my production speed have picked up. The properties panel makes it really easy to modify parameters quickly and is a big time saver.
Recording simulations with Adobe Captivate 5:
The project I am working on requires a lot of recordings of a web-service. The recordings went really well and seem to work better than with Adobe Captivate 4.
Recording sound with Adobe Captivate 5:
Prior to Adobe Captivate 5 I never used Adobe Captivate to record sound since I felt it sounded a bit off. You would also get a slight hissing sound that I didnt’ like. Instead I used Audacity to record my sound and imported it into my project afterwards. However the sound recording works alot better in Adobe Captivate 5. The hissing sound seem to be gone and the sound quality is more natural. I had to record a few pieces of speech in this course and I could just record them directly in Adobe Captivate 5 in a quality I was happy with.
Effects in Adobe Captivate 5:
One of the biggest time-savers so far is the Effects feature in Adobe Captivate 5. The ability to make objects move saved me tons of time since I didn’t have to open Flash and create animations all the time. It will also make it much easier to update the project later on. Read more about Effects in Adobe Captivate here and here.
Other observations:
It’s much easier to work with Advanced Actions due to the new editor. This also saves time. Another great thing is the Master Slide concept and the Style Manager that allows you to define custom styles easily for your captions etc.
The ability to have multiple Captivate files open in the same application and switch between the chapters is really great. Earlier you had to have multiple instances of Adobe Captivate 4 open in order to switch back and forth between chapters. This new MDI approach is alot easier.
I will post a new update once the project is completed
2 Comments
Good analysis Michael. Is there a way to apply properties across slides? ? I did not see one when I fiddled with the Beta a bit. BTW, I am happy to hear about the txt to speech improvements. Thx!
Hi Ed,
Yes you can apply some properties across multiple slides just as with CP4.
By the way – the sound improvements was for recording sound through a mic – not the text to speech feature. Actually I haven’t tested that yet.. will have to look into that.
/Michael