Macromedia Captivate for Windows [Electronic resources] : Visual QuickStart Guide نسخه متنی

Navigating Through a Captivate Movie Placed in Flash MX 2004

When you place a Captivate into Flash MX 2004, everything in the movie is converted to bitmaps. This includes background images, mouse pointers, captions, and so on. These bitmaps are then converted to Flash Graphic symbols and imported into folders in the Captivate Objects folder, which is created in the Flash Library. The original bitmaps will sit loose in the Flash Library along with any sounds used in the Captivate movie (Figure 10.6).

Tip

To avoid a cluttered Flash Library, create a folder in the Library named Bitmaps and another named Sounds. Drag the bitmaps and sounds into their respective Library folders. Do not delete any of the bitmapsthey have tree iconsbecause they are referenced by the symbols in the Captivate Objects folder.

Inside the Captivate Objects folder are a number of subfolders (Figure 10.7) containing the Graphic symbols used in the Flash movie created from your Captivate movie:

Backgrounds (Captivate) Any backgrounds, including the slide background color, are converted to bitmaps, broken apart in Flash, grouped, and then saved as a Graphic symbol. This is a rather clunky approach; if you are familiar with Flash, feel free to replace the object in the symbol with a vector object drawn with the Rectangle tool in the Flash toolbar.

Captions (Captivate) All of the captions used in the movie, including the balloons, are placed in this folder. If you double-click a caption in this folder, the symbol opens, and you can change the text (Figure 10.8).

Elements (Captivate) The contents of this folder comprise all of the bits and pieces used to construct the interface elements, such as the balloons used in captions. Don't change a thing in this folder.

Images (Captivate) All of the inter-faces and other images used in the Captivate movie are moved to this folder (Figure 10.9).

Mouse Pointers (Captivate) Any mouse pointers captured during the recording are converted to bitmaps and placed in this folder.

Playback Controller (Captivate) If you chose to import the controller, the controller movie clip, buttons, and sliders that are in the controller, and the Captivate Info box, are placed in this folder (Figure 10.10).

Navigating through the Flash timeline

When you create your Captivate movie, it is designed to playback through the Flash Player 6 at 30 frames per second (fps). Assuming you have a Captivate movie that is 30 slides long and each slide takes up 15 seconds on the Captivate timeline, you can reasonably assume you are going to need well over 13,000 frames in a Flash movie. This explains why the timeline in a Flash movie is so long. In the case of the movie shown in Figure 10.11, 1,149 frames are used.

How this occurs is a result of how the Captivate movie is reconstructed in Flash. Each slide of the Captivate movie is brought onto the timeline. The duration of the slide is calculated, and the appropriate number of Flash frames is added. Any transitions, such as fade in and fade out, are created using a Flash Tween and, if there are any full motion SWF files attached to the slide, Flash writes the appropriate ActionScript to load the SWF into the movie when it is needed.

Layers are created for objects such as captions, highlight boxes, sounds, mouse movement, and the playback controller. The start point of each slide is indicated by the use of a label (a little flag). As well, any actions that control the playback head are added.

If you find the label names or layer names to be confusing, you can change them.

To change a label name

Tip

Be careful with this step. If there are any buttons in the movie that navigate to different areas of the Flash timeline, they will be included in a folder named Interactive (Captivate). It isn't the button that will cause a problemit is the movie clip that will be the issue. When the Captivate movie is imported into Flash, navigation will use the frame labels. If you change the label, be sure to locate the script containing the navigation and change the name of the label in that script (Figure 10.12).

To change a layer name

It is standard Flash practice to have frame labels appear on a separate Flash layer named Labels. As you can see, Captivate doesn't exactly mirror this "best practice."

To create a separate Labels layer

Changing the frame rate

To the average Flash developer, 30 fps (Captivate's default rate) is quite fast. Again, it is best practice among Flash developers to produce Flash movies with frame rates between 12 and 15 fps. You can change the frame rate of the Flash movie from 30 fps to 12 or 15 fps by double-clicking the frame rate on the timeline to open the Document Properties dialog box (Figure 10.14) and changing the frame rate.

You should approach changing the frame rate with a high degree of caution. Keep in mind that full motion video being "called" into the Flash movie will be affected because these SWF files will adopt the frame rate of the Flash SWF calling them.

If a movie is destined for Flash, it might be a better idea to change the frame rate in Captivate. There could be a lot of extra work that could be done more easily in Captivate.

To change the frame rate