Import Captivate SWF files to Premier...

I'm so very disappointed. I had Adobe Premier Elements 4 and was trying to import software demo's created using Captivate. There was incompatibility with these Captivate created flash files where every frame on the imported flash file is black.



Well, I upgraded from Adobe Premiere Elements 4 to the new version 7 today and was very disappointed to see that this was not fixed.



Does anyone know of any 3rd party plugins that would enable me to import Captivate Flash output to my Premiere projects? I'm trying to show footage of software interface which is much cleaner looking that filming the screen with a video camera.
Import Captivate SWF files to Premier...
Have you contacted Adobe Tech Support? It's likely your system lacks a necessary codec.

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bbe7d56
Import Captivate SWF files to Premier...
Hi Gary,



I have tried this and i can confirm that Captivate SWF files does not get imported correctly to premiere elements. This is primarily because of the way SWFs are created in Captivate. While Captivate creates SWFs with multitrack, PE only imports one track.

There is no way to really integrate Captivate with either Premiere Elements or Pro, I switched to Camtasia :)

I am currently testing Camtasia for this element and yet more frustrations abound.



In both Premier Elements 4 and Premier Elements 7 the AVI clip that I captured of my software demo has instead of a mouse pointer a Black Square, also the light blue desktop color is replaced mysteriously in Premier with Black background.

It's interesting to note though, that the AVI clip captured using Camtasia plays back normally in Windows Media Player with the Mouse pointer and correct background color. It appears Premier does something with the colors in the AVI when it is imported.

You need to convert the file to DV-AVI using Windows Movie Maker.

Still, it is best to do your editing in Camtasia using exports from Premiere Elements rather than the other way around ;)

There is a free tutorial on converting from WMV to DV-AVI using Windows Movie Maker here http://muvipix.com/products.php?subcat_id=42

Converting from AVI to DV-AVI is pretty much the same.

Chuck, thank you, this solved my problem very easily. I will cap with camtasia and export using Microsoft Movie Maker as described in the tutorial. Cheers.

I also tried editing the SWF created with the trial version of Captivate. The main problem is the SWF is not selfcontained. It relys on a separate javascript and html file. Having searched all over for a plug-in or converter myself over the last two months, the only thing that works well was Moyea SWF to AVI converter. And it really doesn't convert it in the conventional sense. It captures it, just as Captivate captured your screen activity. Then I looked at the price and they want $99 USD for the pro version, which allows cropping. Cropping is needed to remove the transport controls that show at the bottom.