Captivate does not record everything

[conric]

I use Captivate since the first version. Now I we would like to record demonstrations from the CAD-Software Pro/ENGINEER (from PTC). With Captivate, we have large problems, since it does not record a Spacetraveller movements. Allthough, we need to insert Screenshots quite often, otherwise many bottons would not be visible.
Camtasia does record everything (mouse movements and Spacetraveller movements, however it misses many other helpful features.

Can somebody help? Thanks conric

[Captiv8r]

Hi conric and welcome to our community

Captivate and Camtasia both would appear to offer the same functionality. I mean, you start each application, record the screen action, then stop recording and produce an output that may be placed on a server, CD or otherwise distributed for viewing by end users.

However, each product does its job in a dramatically different manner. With Camtasia, it is literally like using a computer based camcorder. You begin recording and it does capture everythng on the screen. But this comes at a price. What you capture isn't all that easily edited later. Certain elements aren't automatically added in for you by the application. Captivate records by sensing events and grabbing screen shots along the way. Sometimes it will appear to miss things. When you see this happening, it's a good idea to supplement Captivate's recording with presses of the Print Screen key. After all, it is much easier to pare out extra bits than it is to add them in later.

Cheers... Rick

[Guest]

My suggestion would be to use the hotkey to toggle full motion recording when you need to record this type of data. They keys to start and stop full motion recording while in demonstration mode are F9 and F10 by default.

It's a bit klugey and takes a bit to get used to, but it can have good results if you get a process down. I'd say that the amount of drive space (and time) you save from camtasia makes this extra step justifiable. It's the main reason I dropped camtasia as my recording suite.

As you probably already noticed from experimenting, demonstration produces a very pretty result by simulating mouse movements and clicking in a fraction of the space camtasia or fraps does, but oftentimes misses little details. In order to use captivate effectively for recording complex applications (Maya, Visual Studio during a compiler run, CAD, etc) you just have to learn when and where to do a manual snapshot capture or full motion insert.

Hopefully in coming versions of captivate adobe will include a utility to customize things like event sensitivity and application specific event triggers.

[conric]

Thanks for your answers. We try to use the print screen option, it works fine with a normal mouse, although we need to press the hotkey nearly after every movement. Unfortunatly, Captivate will not record the SpaceTraveller movements. Quite sad. I´d rather like to use Capivate.