Splash Screen is not been recorded...

[vratner]

Hi all... I'm a new Adobe Captivate user (our company recently purchased RoboHelp suite that included Captivate, and we thought we can make use of it when creating demo's, video presentations, and so on for our company's products). I had a chance to evaluate it over the course of the last couple of weeks, and have to say that I was pretty impressed with the amount of features, ease of use, and overall functionality. However, there is one problem with it that I can't figure out. When recording a demo for our software, it does not record the "splash" screen (an opening screen with our company's logo, copyright information, etc. that displays after launching the software, and while it's been initialized). Consequently, if I record a voice narration during that period, and then Publish the project to Flash (.SWF) file, video and audio get out of sync. I have tried all of the Recording Modes, as well as various combinations, but it still won't record (show) it in the project. The only thing that works (captures everything, including a splash screen) is Full Motion Recording, but that obviously defeats the whole purpose of using Captivate, since I can't do any post editing. If anyone has experienced a similar problem, and knows of a solution or perhaps has a recommendation, please let me know. Thank you...

[RoboWizard]

Welcome to our community, vratner

As you are new to Captivate, you may not be aware of a little feature that may help you out. When you are recording and Captivate is automatically capturing things, you are also able to tap the Print Screen key at any point to coax Captivate to grab an image of the screen. So I'm thinking the solution for you may be as simple as tapping the Print Screen key.

As for your narration, you should realize that you almost never want to record your voice narration at the same time as you are recording the on-screen action. Usually your best result will be to narrate the project after the main recording has been done.

Hopefully this helps... Rick

[vratner]

Thank you for your suggestion, RoboWizard. I tried it on my native machine, and it worked!!! However, and I probably should've mentioned it earlier, almost all of our software development, testing, and everything else is done using Virtual Machines (VMWare), and the Print Screen doesn't work there. Pressing it with a combination of CTRL, ALT, and so on keys didn't work either. VM's are a little tricky that way. In fact, that was my first guess when the splash screen didn't get recorded - I thought it was because I was within VM, but the same problem occured outside of it as well, so that obviously wasn't the reason. So what else could prevent it from capturing the splash screen? Why does Full Motion Recording captures it, and the rest of the the recording modes don't? As I said, I've tried all of them, as well as all of the Application, Custom Size, and Full Screen modes. So any suggestions/recommendations? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you...

[Captiv8r]

Hello again

Yeah, full motion capture is a bit of an equine of a different hue. It's literally like turning on a camcorder and recording what you see. And as you have seen, you can't really edit things after the fact. Well, to a certain extent you can, but it's more like using a cheese slicer to trim off bits of the beginning and end or maybe the middle. And you can splice things together. But it's nothing like the screen capture mode and editing you can do that way.

So I suppose we need more information on exactly how things are working on your vmware setup. You say that Print Screen doesn't work there? I'm guessing there is maybe a conflict with the key. Have you tried assigning a different key? Or possibly just try clicking the mouse when you see the splash screen. Usually a mouse click will trigger a screen capture.

Or are you maybe running Captivate on the remote machine and attempting to capture while driving things remotely? If so, I'm unsure if that would even work. But thought I'd ask.

Cheers... Rick

[vratner]

Hi Rick,

I was able to figure out the problem with Print Screen - apparently, older VM versions don't recognize a combination of CTRL-ALT-Print Scrn buttons, but newer ones do. So in order to take a screen shot in an "old" VM, you have to send CTRL-ALT command first to release the cursor, and then Print Screen works. By doing so I was finally able to take a screen shot of my splash screen, while making a recording. And then I tried your other suggestion, clicking the mouse while the splash is been displayed. And it also worked!!! Go figure... So I guess I'll be doing just that. Thank you very much for your help...

P.S. I don't think this is relevant at this point, but to answer your question - I have Captivate installed on my native machine, which I'm using to record our software demo, which runs on the VM.