Question: Where Can I Find Good Library of FLVs?
I would like to open my Captivate movie with some women, men, teenagers, seniors… all looking puzzled with "thought captions" over them stating the different decisions confronting them… What car to buy… what college to go to… which applicant to hire, etc.
I have searched Google, using maybe with the wrong keywords, trying to find libraries of stock characters in Flash animations. Other than the few available on Adobe’s site under resources, I can’t seem to find any others. Do you know of any sources for increasing my library of these kind of things?
Answer
Excellent question. While there are many sites selling royalty free and inexpensive stock photos (BigStockPhoto is one that I’ve used in the past), it does not appear that there are many sites offering stock Flash video. I managed to find some videos at istockphoto.com, but there wasn’t a great selection. Let’s see if any of your fellow readers know of some good sites. If anyone can recommend resources for stock FLVs, please email me and I’ll post your responses here.
Question: How Do I Open a Captivate Template?
I’m perplexed by Captivate templates. I’ve been using and sharing a template for some time at my institution, and we recently decided to change our default screen resolution from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768. Unfortunately, I’m finding that this means that our template’s screen capture now only grabs a small chunk of the screen. I can’t find any way to resize the screen capture to accommodate our new resolution. What the heck? Do we need to build a new template every time we want to resize our screen capture window? (And if so, how can we do that? I’ve seen well-designed templates in the Exchange, but I can’t reverse-engineer them because they’re saved as .cptl files. Are they created in Flash and then exported somehow to Captivate?) Thanks for any light you can shed.
Answer
You can open a Captivate template (CPTL) via File > Open. Once the template is open, you can increase the capture area from 800×600 to 1024×768 by resizing the project (via the Project menu). Keep in mind however that if there are background images in the current template, increasing the size will likely result in a loss of resolution.
Got a question you’d like answered? Email me.