Creating DVDs from Articulate productions

I have been working on a process to create DVDs from Articulate presentations and have been successful. It is not turnkey though.

It requires, naturally, that the presentation not have any Engage or Quiz elements or any other slides requiring user interaction. It is also necessary to move all elements on background to the foreground (if there is a background colour set that must be simulated by creating a box of the appropriate colour as the lowest layer on the foreground).

Rendering/publishing in Articulate produces a .swf file for each slide (in the data/swf directory) named slidex.swf. I change the publishing quality settings temporarily for the presentation for this publishing cycle to the highest quality audio/video option available and publish to a different directory to avoid overwriting the original presentation(make sure to remember to change them back to normal settings or your later publishing will create very large files).

I then process each slidex.swf file through a program that will convert swf files to avi or wmv files. There are a number on the market. I have tried "iWisoft Flash SWF to Video Converter" and "SWF &FLV Toolbox". There are others as well. I use the highest quality settings I can for output. Both that I have tried have problems and glitches but I have been able to get through the conversion process successfully. The process produces a series of avi files that can then be used to create a dvd.

Any slides that have video I replace with the original high quality avi video (before conversion to flv and embedding in the presentation). (Addendum -- slides that have swf movies require you to use the original swf movie rather than the slide swf. If Articulate Presenter has audio for these slides it will have to be extracted and added to the movie during editing/assembly).

I have found "Windows Movie Maker" (available free from Microsoft for Vista and XP) adequate for the avi assembly process -- assembling the avi files into the units you want to be the eventual scenes on the DVD. I used "Windows DVD Maker" (also free from Microsoft) to create the DVD from the scenes. Any video editing program ( like Sony Vegas) or DVD maker (Nero is a product that I have used in the past) would work here.