It’s time to learn a bit more about Adobe Captivates newest features.

I hadn’t played with branching, so first I  Googled, and found the really cool example of branching with the Captivate image slideshow, which I hadn’t used either. The demo is available at http://blogs.adobe.com/educationleaders/2010/03/adobe_captivate_-_branching_sl.html

For my example, I played with a screen demo of a friend’s site,  TheMusicBook, an online music directory for musicians in Australia.

For the branching, I  decided to create a basic menu for some of the search options at The Music Book.

As the objective was to host the video at YouTube, although I could have used a 16:9 ratio (the latest ratio at YouTube), I just used the standard 4:3 ratio, for this narrow site. I recorded at 1024×768.

Things never go smoothly when recording demonstrations. Despite taking notes earlier in the day, I forgot to adjust the Captivate defaults before recording, so I had to go back afterwards and turn of mouse clicks, mouse display, and default durations.

Then on the last screen, I clicked outside the recording window, and Firefox crashed. Firefox tends to crash about once a week for me,  so that’s not unusual.

I added the extra screen for the menu buttons, created the branching by editing the buttons so that they would “go to”  the correct place in the demo, and return to the menu when the branch was complete.

Saved and published it as a SWF as usual. Tested it in the browser,   and the branching was nice, interactive, and working.

But the problem with YouTube is that it won’t accept SWF files for uploading. Even though Captivate can publish as AVI, my past experiments found the filesize was waaay too large.

So as per one of the suggestions from an old Adobe blog, I purchased SoThink’s SWF to AVI conversion program.

My first attempt at conversion lasted 2 seconds – there’s a default option in SoThink, that automatically finishes recording after the last slide, and for some odd reason with Captivate SWF files, it always thinks the first slide is the last slide.  So I turned off the setting and tried again.

This time it sat and did nothing after the first slide. I’m assuming this is because the interactive menu started on the second slide. So I ended up pretending to be an interactive visitor, and selected each of the menu options whilst playing and recording my Captivate demonstration, in SoThink. I’m not sure if this means that you can’t have an interactive video in YouTube, or to convert an interactive SWF into AVI. Whatever.

So now I had an AVI format movie. Time to upload it to YouTube.

I logged in, and started uploading. YouTube lets you edit the title and description while the upload is progressing in the background.  Strangely, as soon as I typed the word Captivate into the description tag, the upload ended with an error. No details, just an error.

Was it a format problem?   What the heck, let’s try it again.  I didn’t use the word Captivate in the description, and this time it uploaded successfully.

It’s not a great example – it’s just an adventure. And here it is:

It’s fun planning for a new year. All the things you want to achieve this year. One of which is creating more videos. And videos need music. And music usually has copyright problems.

So I need a music program to create my own music. I have a lovely Roland touch-sensitive electric keyboard, which I haven’t played for around 3 years since my dad gave me his mum’s upright piano, which plays beautifully. So I have something to connect to my laptop, assuming the music program has a midi interface. Although dad taught me to read music in Kindergarten, I’ve only done 1 year of formal music theory (in 1976), so my knowledge is a little casual.

Hunting around, I’ve found this list of Garageband alternatives:

Mixcraft
M-Audio’s Session
Sony’s Acid Music Studio – they also have Acid Pro for Pros, or Super Duper Music Looper for kids.
FL Studio – formerly known as Fruity Loops
Steinberg’s Sequel
Magix Samplitude
Magix Music Maker 14
Reaper
Reason

They all seem to have a version at around the $US40-50 price point.
And all seem to have free downloads.

Each one seems to have it’s supporters online. And the more I research, the more I find it hard to decide.

The main selling points for me are the availability of sample loops to drag and drop.
And the ability to connect to my piano keyboard.

I was leaning towards the Sony products, but the Mixcraft description says that it is compatible with the Sony loop library. They all look really good. But I think Mixcraft is the go.

Happy to hear opinions before I buy the full version.