Automatic Panning

[aedoherty]

I am recording a software simulation in Captivate 7 and have set it to automatic panning because part of the demo scrolls down a menu. The result does not pan down the menu, and I can't figure out why. When I do the same thing in Captivate 5 it pans with no problem. Any help greatly appreciated.

[Varun Kalra]

Hi there,

Does it not scroll down the Pan area at the time of recording you mean? or is it in the published output?

Can you please confirm, the operating System that you are using?

If it is Windows 7, then run the program as admin.

And then try to record that software.

Thanks.

[aedoherty]

I’m on Windows 7. I tried running as admin, but I’m still having the problem. When I click on a menu, the menu item I select is at the bottom of the screen. I want to follow my mouse movement so that you can see what I have selected on the menu, but it’s not working. It works fine in version 5 but not in 7. What am I doing wrong?

[Sivakumar_Nagarajan]

Hi

There have been some changes in the auto-panning behavior of Captivate across versions.

The most note-worthy change being increase in the tolerance bounds beyond which auto-pan kicks in.

In earlier versions, when the mouse moves beyond (approx) 1/4th the dimensions of the recording area away from the center of the recording area, auto-pan would get triggered.

In recent versions, this tolerance limit has been increased to 1/2 of the dimensions of the recording area away from the center of the recording area. In other words, the mouse has to fall on the edges of or further away from the recording area. This has been done to reduce unwanted panning when mouse is well within the recording area.

If this is unsuitable for you and you want the recording to involve a pan action when you move the mouse cursor to the menu item, you may reduce the height of the recordig area before you start recording. This way, when the mouse cursor reaches the menu item, it would fall outside the recording area and an auto-pan will get triggered.

Please let us know if that worked

Cheers

Siva

[aedoherty]

Thanks for the information. That didn’t work for me. The problem is that if I change the height too much, the ratio will be off. I guess I’ll just have to live with it. Sometimes I wish they would just leave well enough alone! Thanks for getting back to me.

[aedoherty]

Can you answer another question for me? For my projects, I record each slide separately, but the audio volume is not consistent. I’ve tried editing it for each slide and setting it to Normalize (best volume), which fixes the problem on slides where the sound is too low, but it still doesn’t set the audio at a consistent volume on all slides.

Is there a way to do that? Thanks for your help.

[Sivakumar_Nagarajan]

Hi

Regarding the auto-panning, let us not change the dimensions of your recording. Can you please let me know if at all auto-panning gets triggered when mouse cursor is moved away from the recording area? What are the dimensions of your project?

Regarding the audio level, it is very hard for anyone to speak at the exact same pitch and amplitude on different sessions. Alternatively what people do is to record audio (narrative) track separately and captivate allows for automatic/manual overlaying of audio over the slides. There are options to turn on the preview of the slides as a movie in contnuous playback mode while recording the audio as well.

Cheers

Siva

[aedoherty]

My project is 891 x 586. It looks like it’s panning when I record, but when I play it back I can’t see the bottom of the screen where it has panned down.

How do you preview in continuous playback and record?

[Sivakumar_Nagarajan]

Hi

So, I am assuming that while recording (with auto-pan = ON), if you take the mouse outside the recording area, then the recording area glides to catch the mouse. This panning action(s) results in one or more FMRs. Please check the project library to see if there any swf files of the form FullmotionX_Y.swf in the Media section. When you preview the FMR slides (slides with the movie camera icon) on stage, you should be able to see the panned recording. If you feel things are not working that way, then, you may share a link to a sample cptx and published output. I can take a look at it and let you know my comments.

Regarding audio recording with continuous playback preview:

Main menu->Audio->Record To->Slides

In the popup dialog, choose the range of slides that you wish to replace the audio for

In the audio recording dialog, make sure "Add/Replace" tab is selected. Turn ON "continuous play" and "SWF preview" check boxes.

Start recording the audio.

Cheers

Siva