Mouse capture won't activate

[Khoji]

I'm getting on nicely with my trial of Captivate 3 but for some reason the program no longer automatically captures mouse movement while recording -- I always have to add it manually afterwards. It doesn't matter how often I activate the settings to capture mouse movement in Edit > Preferences > Modes, the mouse is never captured. I can add it afterwards relatively easily but it is annoying and the fact that the settings have no effect make the program feel a little buggy. I've tried setting and resetting it for all modes, even the ones I'm not using, but that doesn't have any effect either.

I'm forced to work in Vista, unfortunately, because the client requires it -- is it possible that that has something to do with it? Is Captivate 3 fully Vista compatible? (As far as anything can be Vista compatible...)

As an aside: I'm updating from version 1 and it's a huge disappointment that there is still no common audio track separate from the slides, that makes recording the audio so much more difficult. Actually you really need two or three tracks to be able to work comfortably, but one common track in addition to the clip tracks for each slide would make working with audio around 98% easier.

[Captiv8r]

Hi Khoji

Captivate 3 is supposed to be totally Vista compatible. However, we should balance this statement with the possible disclaimer that we probably haven't seen it "in the wild" long enough to know what (if any) issues will surface with using it on Vista. Because of this, I'm going to say that it's entirely possible it could be Vista related.

I'm a bit confused with your mention of the audio tracks. Essentially, Captivate has three places that audio can be used.

* Background track
* Slide level audio
* Object level audio

I'm not sure how you are thinking that a "common" audio track would help things. Are you saying that you would like to see all the audio in one place? Have you looked at the Advanced Audio Settings? I know that no timeline exists there, but you may view all associate audio in one place with this dialog.

Cheers... Rick

[Khoji]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the answer -- but Captivate's capture mouse function continues to be defective. It just doesn't work and I really don't see why I should be forced to add it manually on every capture on a program that costs so much and is in its third version -- basic things like that should really have been ironed out by now.

quote:

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I'm a bit confused with your mention of the audio tracks. Essentially, Captivate has three places that audio can be used.

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That's not quite true. The background track is only suitable for music, you can't really use it at all for timed commentary, so that is out of the picture to begin with. Yes, you can assign audio either to objects or to slides but the audio for objects is also effectively useless for commentary -- it has no audio track display in the timeline and since it is just a little invisible chunk attached to the object, and will get truncated without warning if you reduce the length of the object, it has no practical use as part of the continuous commentary, on the whole it can really only be used for sound effects for objects.

This leaves only the slide audio. Here too, the implementation radically reduces the usefulness and makes comfortable audio editing impossible. Instead of having a continuous, separate audio track running beneath all slides you only have little chopped-up chunks of audio assigned to the individual slides. Having a slide audio track is a good idea, but it would only make sense in combination with a common audio track. At the moment, if you record audio across several slides it gets "chunked" into little bits in each slide, making any audio editing or timeline adjustments in the slides completely impossible afterwards. Generally you will want to make small adjustments to both audio length (by removing and adding tiny snippets of silence) and slide length (by making durations in the slides longer and shorter). This is only really possible with a separate audio track in addition to the slide audio tracks.

[Khoji]

Update: I just sent a bug report on the mouse capture problem to the Adobe Captivate team via the Support form in the Captivate section of this website. A few minutes later I got a bounced mail message with the following information in the header:

quote:

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----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<wish-captivate@macromedia.com>
(reason: 550 Host not found for domain:macromedia.com - psmtp)

---

Note that I didn't send the mail myself, it was sent by the official Captivate support form on this website. This means that Adobe has set up an address for support requests that always bounces, because the requests are always sent to the Macromedia address, which has now been defunct for a long time. This means that no Captivate support requests will ever be received by Adobe. This is a pretty good way of reducing the support team's workload but I'm not quite so sure whether it's a productive business policy...

Is it just me or isn't all this just a little bit strange for a professional program in Captivate's price range, produced by a company like Adobe? I could accept this kind of thing from a little shareware company charging $30 for their products, but this is beginning to get somewhat silly...

[Guest]

Hello Khoji,

I have experienced the same issue when attempting to file a bug or submit a feature request. I have already contacted a member of the Adobe Captivate team regarding this matter. Bearing in mind that it is the Thanksgiving holiday in the US today, it might be Monday before anyone can jump on this.

Regards - Mark

[Constantine_Grancharov]

I am on WindowsXP and am experiencing the same problem. The "capture mouse movements" setting does not work once you disable the setting to automatically add highlight boxes (resetting the options does not help). The only option is to try creating a new project. There is definitely some kind of a bug.

[robertnagle]

Wow, I experienced the exact same thing on xp (and as a result a demo for a presentation tomorrow will be late or won't work). I'm clueless about how to make the mouse visible once again. I did not mess around with the defaults, but I did push the buttons to restore defaults. I'm still uncertain why this is happening. I can go to the slide menu and re-enable

This really sucks, you know.
Update: I discovered a fix: Highlight all slides, go to Slides --> Mouse --> Show Mouse on edit menu.