With this first review of Adobe Captivate 2019, I wanted to focus on the Interactive Video feature that has been included as part of the update to Adobe Captivate.
The interactive video feature is an awesome addition to Adobe Captivate’s already impressive list of features to develop eLearning. This feature also makes sense, with video becoming a more prominent delivery option to deliver learning experiences.
The most notable thing about the interactive video feature is the ability to do two things;
- Create slide overlays that appear over the top of the video
- Set bookmarks along the video in the timeline of the slide, which can then be directly navigated to
I’ll talk about the slide overlay feature first. The really cool thing about slide overlays is that you can create a slide, like you would normally, and then overlay that slide on top of the video. This creates a pause as the video is being viewed. The duration of the pause is actually determined by the duration of the slide that is being overlaid.
In the screenshot of the example below, the project is made up of 3 slides. The video is on slide 2. The 3rd slide is being used as the overlay slide.
I will also bring to your attention on slide 2, the timeline has two extra layers appearing above the video layer. These layers are Bookmark and Overlay. I’ll talk about Bookmarks shortly.
The Overlay layer on the interactive video slide (slide 2), and associated marker is used to determine when the Overlay slide is displayed.
When a normal slide becomes an overlay slide, slide 3 in this case, the thumbnail size of that slide in the Filmstrip panel, becomes smaller than a normal slide.
The Overlay Slide will also display an icon below that slide, indicating that it is being used as an overlay slide. These can be pointed out in the screenshot as displayed to the right here.
In this example, Slide 3 is the overlay slide so it is smaller than the normal slides in the filmstrip view. Overlay slides can not be incorporated in to the project like a normal slide, unless it is “Unlinked” as an Overlay slide and returned to normal slide status.
When previewing a project with an interactive video, the preview needs to be conducted as an “HTML5 in Browser” preview.
Previewing in Captivate doesn’t display any slides with an interactive video slide, and the Preview Project feature will bypass all slides with interactive video, so a reminder to Preview “HTML5 in Browser”.
The preview below displays the point in the video slide where the slide overlay is displayed. You will notice that the slide is “see through” with a blurred background.
Any part of the slide (being used as the overlay) that doesn’t have any objects will “see through to the video.
As shown in the screenshot above, we can also include buttons in overlay slides, which can navigate to different slides, or even other sections of the same video. Navigating to other sections of the same video uses a feature called Bookmarks.
With the Bookmarks feature, navigating directly to specific points of the video can easily be achieved through the Actions menu, just like you would Jump to a specific slide, or execute an advanced action. This presents opportunities to jump straight to another point in the video.
To create a bookmark, pause the video in the timeline where you would like the bookmark to occur, then click the plus sign in the bookmark layer where the play-head is displayed.
Give the bookmark a name, and presto, you now have a point in the project that can be directly navigated to.
So all in all, some fantastic new features around Interactive Video now available in Adobe Captivate 2019.
You can view a published version of the example file here.