Subtitles of the Movie

More often than not when working on your e-learning courses, you'll probably have some areas of the screen that you want learners to pay particular attention to, whether you are creating software-based training, soft skills, et cetera, being able to focus the learner's attention on a certain area of the slide is incredibly useful. To accomplish this in Adobe Captivate, you use highlight boxes. To access the highlight boxes, go to the Insert Menu, choose Standard Object and then choose Highlight Box. You can also access these via the right click on the Context Menu, again choose Insert, Standard Objects and then Highlight Box. From the dialog you can specify the appearance and as you can see, it also includes tabs such as options, audio, as well as size and position. Clicking OK now creates a regular highlight box which will by default fade in and fade out. To demonstrate this I'll press F3 on the keyboard. As you can see, it fades in and then fades out again. To make further adjustments you can simply double click on the Highlight Box using either the slide or timeline as well as that with the highlight box still selected. You can choose Edit followed by Properties. From here I'll change the options so that the highlight box just fades in. I'll also change the value to 0.7 seconds to give it a bit more time. And I'll click OK. To create a new highlight box with my existing one still selected, I can go to the Edit Menu and if I wanted to I could choose Copy then Paste. A much easier way is just to choose duplicate. Notice also the keyboard shortcut Control plus D. And then reposition that one like so. As with any other object, you can adjust the duration and when the highlight box appears via the timeline. To demonstrate this I'll quickly delete this new highlight box. I'm going to position the original one like so, just resize it and now to increase the duration I can click and drag and to move it to a new point in the timeline and just click and drag like that. Now if I press F3, you can see how that looks. Now, notice what happened there is that the play head's just moved from the existing point that I was on the timeline back to the end but what I'm going to do is press the Home Key on the keyboard, which takes the playback head to the beginning and now I'll press F3 once more so we can see it fades in and stays on the screen. Once the learner's attention has kind of been drawn to the desired area, quite frankly it's far too subtle. What I really want is for the learner's attention to be zoomed into that portion of the screen and to do this what I'm going to do is just simply double click. I'll use the object in the timeline and I'm going to remove the frame width like so, going to set the transparency to 30 by pressing the Tab Key and I'll click on the Fill Color, select the Eyedropper and then choose this color from the Adobe logo. Having done that I'm now going to choose this option called Fill Outer Area. Having set all the properties, I'll click OK. And now if I press F3 you can clearly see the area that I want my learner's attention to be focused on. Now, the last thing I want to show you here is how highlight boxes can be used to erase areas of the screen that you don't want showing up. Let's say for example that I've decided I don't want this VTC AirPlayer logo displayed in this Word document. To get rid of it, what I'm going to do is go to the Insert Menu, choose Standard Objects, Highlight Box. I'm going to set the Fill Transparency to zero, going to use the Eyedropper. Actually I'll just use the palette and I'll chose White here and I'll click OK. Now what I can do is move that highlight box over the logo and then if I right click inside the selected highlight box to show the context menu, you can see this option entitled Merge into Background and if I choose that particular option, you get this Alert Box. I'll just click OK and then the highlight box is applied to the background of the slide. Being able to use highlight boxes in this way enables you to erase unwanted screen elements that are located in a flat color region of the slide.