evaluating Captivate, blank screen when trying full motion

[bernardAtJG]

Hi everybody,

I'm trying Captivate : I have the 30 days trial version. When I try to record a full-motion movie all I get is a blank screen. Is this a limitation of the 30 days trial version (which would be painful because I need to do, amongst other, full-motion recording) ? Or am I doing something wrong ?

'Normal' recording works fine and play backs fine, but 'full motion' recording gives me a blank screen.

Any tip ?

:)

[Guest]

which application you are trying to record? if it is movie players then try to set "hardware accleration" to off

[bernardAtJG]

Hi,

thanks for the answer... I tried with 'hardware acceleration off' but I'm still having the same problem : white screen.

Setup is dual 21" screen monitor hooked on a ATI X1650 gfx card, using DVI cables (though I guess this doesn't change anything).

The application is a proprietary Java 1.6 application, running animations that we'd like to capture, if possible. If not we'll just do the demos without full motion recording, but it won't look as good.

Thanks again for the answer and if you have any other ideas, any help is welcome.

[TonyJover2]

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem.

I'm trying to capture a screen with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 (I think - it's around that size).

Full Motion Capture gives me a blank white screen with little 'pieces' of the screen appearing where the mouse drags over. The other recording method gives me one blank slide with no animation.

I was only trying to capture around 20 secs as my first experiment.

Is there perhaps a size limit to what Captivate can cope with?

Regards,
Tony

[Captiv8r]

Welcome to our community, Tony

I'm wondering if the sheer volume of your capture area is simply too large.

Could you please conduct a test to see? Try this.

Open Captivate
Click File > Record/Create > New Project...
Choose Software Simulation and Custom Size
Click the Preset sizes button and choose 640 x 480 Full Screen
Record and make sure to include some Full Motion (Hint, if you press the F9 key, you enter Full Motion Recording mode until you turn it off using F10)

After you try this, do you still end up with a blank screen where the full motion should be?
If so, try one other thing.
Click Edit > Preferences... > Recording node > Full Motion Recording node
Try changing the working folder to C:\ instead of where it is currently pointing.

Let us know if any of that helped. If you are still having issues, I would suggest you contact Adobe support. Also you should probably consider reporting this as a possible bug to Adobe. Oddly enough, you report bugs via the Wish Form. (It's also a bug reporting form)
Click here to view the WishForm/Bug Reporting Form

I sincerely hope something here helps resolve your issue. Good luck... Rick

[TonyJover2]

Thanks for the suggestions Rick, I appreciate you taking the time.

Unfortunately, nothing I could do would give me any kind of a reliable workflow. Maybe Captivate doesn't like XP64 too much?

I was evaluating it against Camtasia and whilst Captivate has some nice features, it lost out big-time on usability. So unfortunately this user has jumped into the other camp, and I've already created some usable tutorials.

Thanks again for your time,
Regards,
Tony

[bruce-lmemp]

Bernard,

I had the same problem with my motion captures showing as blank white screens. I did notice that when outputted as html it did appear just fine. The problem was actually happening when previewing slides in Captivate. from another thread on this message board they suggested installing version 9 which I assume was an older version. I must have been using version 10, the latest. anyways to make it short after installing an older flash player the slide previews worked again and no more white screens. I downloaded the 160MB+ installer from adobe's website. just google it

Regards,

          Bruce

[Guest]

Has anyone found a solution for this? It HAS to be some kind of conflict with a program or something. Captivate worked fine for me one month ago and now I have the same problem as the other two in this post. I have tried everything listed. I turned off hardware acceleration when recording, re-installed, did spyware scans, stopped all running programs, everything and I cannot get it to record anything, either an Automatic or Full motion recording. The result is ALWAYS the same no matter what options I choose. I have tried every combination of everything and all I get is one blank slide. I CAN record by inserting additional slides, as the other people can. This ALL just worked a month ago. I teach a captivate class and I taught just last month and it was fine. I go to teach this month and can't even show how to do a simple recording!!! Please anyone who has found what was causing this issue, please post. I am going to try to upgrade to 5 now, but I just purchased not too long ago and it really stinks if the solution is to pay more money and upgrade.

[Guest]

I would like to add that since all of us (I think) have been able to insert additional slides after the initial blank slide, I am really thinking it is NOT a user side issue with graphics cards, acceleration settings, or running programs. This seems like it is a program issue maybe with an update or something? Please correct me if I am wrong, but I really don't feel like it is a user issue. Any suggestions at all would be very helpful.

[RodWard]

I'm wondering whether this might be related to permissions on the temp working folder where Captivate tries to store the full motion captures.  Captivate by default uses a folder down inside the user's Profile on the C drive but maybe something has changed your permissions there.

Try changing the location of the working folder at Preferences > Recording > Full Motion Recording > Working Folder > Browse

Change it to point to a folder that you are absolutely certain you have full read / write permissions to.  Perhaps create a folder inside your My Documents folder for it.

Then see if you can do any better with your capture.

[Guest]

I did try changing the folder earlier as per someone's suggestion but I kept it in the local app folder. This time I changed it to a folder on my desktop. I also went and killed all non-essential services and apps. It still does not work. This is so very frustrating that I can't get this to work and even more frustrating since it was working fine before. The only things I have done since it last worked was install nero. I killed any nero background apps. I also tried to get something that was freeware (I can't even remember what it was) and I got a ton of spyware and crap all over but as I said before, I have done every scan with every software I can think of to eliminate it all. It just does not make any sense why it would not do the initial recording but record anything I want once I am in. I have just downloaded the CS5 trial and will be installing it momentarily. I hope this solves the issue but I am still just baffled. Cross your fingers for me - i will post if it worked.

[RodWard]

Have you tried deleting your Captivate Preferences folder as yet?  That seems to fix quite a few weird issues, maybe it will fix this one.

You can find the preferences files for Captivate 5 here:

- on Xp: C:\Documents and Settings\<USER NAME>\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Captivate 5

- on Vista/Win7:C:\Users\<USER NAME>\AppData\Local\Adobe\Captivate 5

- on MAC: /Users/<USER NAME>/Library/Preferences/

Captivate 4 Preferences should be in a similar area in each case.  Just delete the folder and let Cp recreate it again at next boot.

[Guest]

First off, thank you so much for your responses. That was the ONE thing that I could not do and between all of the other things I have been trying, I forgot to re-visit this issue. I do not have anything in my captivate folder except for "Spelling." I created a temp folder there when I changed the path for the FMR, so that was there too. I DO have hidden and system files and folders showing. I am running Windows 7 Home and when I navigate to C:\Users\"username"\AppData\Local\Adobe\Adobe Captivate, there was the Spelling folder only. Inside of that are the following files:

accent.tlx
AutoCorrect.tlx
condcorr.tlx
correct.tlx
HTML.tlx
Userdic.tlx

None of those appear to be preference files. The preferences ARE being retained when I change them though. I did poke all around in my data folders and found one preference file in the AppData\Roaming. I did delete that and it appeared to reset my preferences. I am STILL having the same problem with Captivate 4.:-0

Now for the good news, but still kind of not good. I did install CP5 and it works fine. Which causes even more confusion and makes me suspect that it is something going on in the Captivate 4 programming or settings or something that relates to the actual program and not local settings or installed apps. The bad news is that now I have to pay more money if I would like to continue using the program and also, I teach Cap 4 and not 5 in an online atmosphere so this will confuse the students if I am using 5 but teaching 4. I teach for a very large coporation and even if I tell them to upgrade, they will not. It will cost them too much money. So, if anyone ever does figure out the issue or have additional suggestions please post!

Thanks again. Still don't know what I am going to do but will have to make the best of it! Just an FYI (a little off topic) - Cap 5 did not replace Cap 4 so I have both versions installed now. I think Adobe changed this starting with CS3 where you can install multiple versions.