Adobe Captivate 2 (formerly Macromedia RoboHelp) is a screen capture tool and much more. It has the ability to embed Flash movies, including movies generated in Character Builder. Here are some best-practice notes for Captivate 2 and 3.

As is always the case with integration, you'll need to decide who's on the outside. The Builder includes the ability to embed one or more Flash movies, and control those movies through actions such as Play, Stop, and Goto Frame. However the Captivate output is not a linear list of frames, and is not currently compatible with the movie-control actions. The alternative is to create one or more Character Builder movies for insertion into the Captivate movie.

IMPORTANT: You must use the "Straight Flash" Output Type setting when creating a new project for insertion in this manner. You can start with the Straight Flash New Project Wizard, or find the Output Type setting in the Project object property panel in Outline View. Adobe Captivate may preview correctly with the regular, Single File output, however the published material will not run correctly.

Your stage will normally be small - just large enough to contain the character and any arm actions it might use. You can include a background image, but by default the Character Builder output has a transparent background.

In Captivate you can right-click on a slide and use Insert Animation, or drag your swf file to the library and then drag it from the library to the Captivate slide where the character is to appear. You can move your character around on the slide by dragging it.

Right click on the movie and choose Properties to view the properties of the movie. You can choose to display your animation for a specific time, for the duration of the slide, or for the duration of the animation itself. The "Synchronize with project" should NOT be checked, as this setting does not support audio.

Ideally you should match the frame rate of Captivate to that of the Builder. You can set the frame rate of your Builder project using the Advanced tab on the Project object. The default Captivate frame rate is 30 fps. If you don't match frame rates, then the timing may be off when it displays the length of the movie in seconds. Similarly if you specify that your movie must play for a certain time, then your movie may stop prematurely, since the computation is done based on the Captivate frame rate of 30 fps rather than the default CB frame rate of 12 fps.

If you update your Character Builder content and Render to Flash again, be sure to update your movie within Captivate. Do this by opening the library pane, right-clicking on the swf file, and selecting Update.

The character need not appear on each slide, or it may appear in a different location from one slide to the next. If you use it to create a software simulation, then Captivate will create many slides, frequently of very short duration. You can place a character on the first slide, and as long as it is specified to display for "duration of animation" in the Animation Options dialog, the character will appear continuously across multiple slides.

If you use a character to narrate your project, then you may not want to do your narration in Captivate. Alternatively, if you already have audio in Captivate, (in particular audio that has been carefully timed to match a software simulation) then you can export the audio from Captivate - locate the file in the Captivate library, right click, then Export to folder. Captivate writes both a .wav and an .mp3 file. Ignore the .mp3 file, and use the .wav file with the Import Audio feature present in build 152.