Since I reviewed Adobe^R Captivate^TM 2 a few months ago, Adobe has released the latest upgrade with many new features for adding practice and assessment to your training videos. Over the last few years, it has amazed me how many ways businesses and noncommercial ventures are incorporating training videos into their product lines. For example, book publishers such as Peachpit Press now have training video Podcasts on their websites and include them on the DVD packaged with their newest releases. Captivate 3 makes creating Podcasts and other types of training videos easy and you do not need any programming or multimedia skills. Being a teacher at heart, I can't imagine any form of digital art that is more beneficial than training videos. When I suggested to a well-known author of Flash^R training videos that he consider writing a book version of his tutorials, he promptly reminded me that he could teach his audience so much more with a video compared to the same amount of time dedicated to writing a book.

Over the past years, Captivate 3 has had several changes in order to keep up with the advancements in training videos. The previous versions of Captivate concentrated on software and scenario-based training and there have been several improvements in these areas such as better branching of learning paths, grouping slides together within branched paths and better visual representation of learning paths in the program's Branching tab. These improvements make it much easier to create complex learning paths. You can even export the view from the Branching tab as a BMP or PNG "hard copy". And, Captivate still automatically generates text captions and instructional feedback for you.

The best news is Captivate's new features for testing and feedback. You now have many more options when creating interactive training videos. My favorite time-saver is multi-mode recording. If you have ever created a training video, you know how much time it takes to make only a few minutes of video. Being able to reuse any part of the same or another project is very important. Captivate's new multi-mode recording and re-recording allows you to create once and produce your training video in several modes.

• Demonstration with mouse movements and descriptive text
  
• Interactive practice simulations with feedback
  
• Assessment with branching and scoring
  
  

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