Problems with Auto Capture

[Alma_TS]

Hi - we are evaluating the trial version of Captivate to see whether we can create demos/tutorials of our desktop software. We're using auto-capture to record screen actions, so it does a screen capture each time we use the mouse to click a button. When we look at the slides after capturing them, many of the slides show random parts of the underlying window superimposed over the dialog box, as though the screen was captured while it was being refreshed. So I have 2 questions:

1. Is there any way to prevent this from happening?

2. If not, and if we need to use manual screen captures to replace any gunked-up automatically-captured screens, how do we move the mouse click action from the auto slide to the equivalent manual slide? Captivate will let us move other things on the timeline between slides, but doesn't seem to want to let us move the mouse object.

I'm sorry if this isn't clear; we're still quite new at this! Thank you.
- Alma Taylor-Smyth

[Captiv8r]

Hi Alma Taylor-Smyth and welcome to our community

Note that you can actually use a combination of manually pressing print screen to take additional screen captures. So as you use Captivate, you can easily supplement your auto captures with manual captures. Unfortunately, there is simply no way I'm aware of to prevent those screens (partial or blank) from being recorded. Captivate runs locally and captures very fast. So if that screen hasn't had time to properly render (as is often the case with Internet/Intranet applications) it grabs the screen in partial and empty states sometimes.

As for the mouse movement, note that all Captivate really records is the ending point and whether there is a click or not. If you right click the slide, you can easily point at Mouse and then "Show Mouse". Then configure the ending point, desired click actions and other options. (to get at these options, double click the Mouse object in the Timeline)

Hopefully this helps... Rick 🙂

[Captiv8r]

Hi again

I should have said:

Unfortunately, there is simply no way I'm aware of to prevent those screens (partial or blank) from being recorded ( When using Auto Capture mode) Of course, with a bit of control and attention, they can be avoided if you are simply recording in full manual mode.

Cheers... Rick 🙂

[Alma_TS]

Hi - thanks for the quick replies!

I'd known about combining auto and manual screen captures, but had no idea how to add the mouse and click actions, so that really helps. It sounds like that will work.

It would be nice if there were a way to configure a (very) brief delay for the captures -- the app we're capturing is a desktop program, not web-based, and surely it's not the only program that has this problem. I think we'll have to give up completely on auto capture, since there's no way to know which screen captures have the problem until you're editing them. We'll keep experimenting!

Thanks,
Alma