Tricks for smoother Full Motion Recording?

[mgason]

Hi,
are there any things I can do to get around very bad full motion recording.
The problem seems to be the extra PC load of running Captivate on top of the application.

The application is an industrial control program. The screen being captured is an animation displaying the process running in the factory. It is a 1024x768 capture.
Full Motion recording is the only way to go as lots is going on on screen and no user input is involved.

A good indicator of the problem is that the application screen has a clock which displays seconds. This clicks along nicely, but when you start captivate the clock/screen updates every 5 or 6 seconds.
The capture is unusable like this.

I have disable hardware acceleration checked
is there anything else I can try?

thanks
mark

[Captiv8r]

Hi Mark

As much as I like Captivate, I might suggest that for this particular task, you investigate other tools. The thing is, Captivate has never been all that useful as a full motion recording tool.

You might take a look at Fraps ( http://www.fraps.com)

It was designed to capture video games, so it may be more suitable for the task at hand.

Cheers... Rick

[mgason]

Hi,
thanks for the reply. I took a quick look at that. I see it records to WMV format. I need to end up with a flash file actually.

I have the technology to get from wmv to flash.
I noticed reading their site that they have their own codec.
Would that be an issue if I am trying to go from wmv to swf or flv?

Mark

[mgason]

I am posting this in case others might come across this thread while researching the same problem.
Fraps will not work for regular screen capture.
Here is the reply with suggested solutions I received after emailing the makers of Fraps

"Thanks for your inquiry. Fraps is only designed to capture 3D applications using DirectX or OpenGL, it won't work with standard 2D programs. However there are plenty of other programs that can be used to capture the desktop. If you are after a free one I'd recommend trying Camstudio. You can download this from the following page:

http://www.brothersoft.com/soft/CamStudio.exe

Popular commercial desktop recorders include Camtasia (www.techsmith.com) and Hypercam (www.hyperionics.com)
Regards,
Chris Van Graas"

I am going to take a look at camstudio
Mark