Can I record everything in just one slide?

[Spotuser]

Hello,

I’m trying to create an 30-second flash animation of our software, with some textual callouts. Since I’ve got the Adobe Technical Communication Suite, I figured I’d use Captivate for the job, but I’m new to it and can’t get my head around some things. If someone has the time to point me in the right direction, I’d appreciate it. I have tried checking the help and rummaging through forums, but still can’t get it to work the way I want.

I’m using the “Full Motion Recording” mode, since our software is pretty interactive in real-time and I want to show that. All I want is to do is record about 30 seconds of me using our software, and afterwards add text callouts here and there, before exporting to an .swf file.

Question 1: Captivate automatically chops up my recording into several “slides”, is there a way to make it put everything in just one slide? Or set the default time of a slide in order to get my entire recording in one single slide? The problem is, if I want to place a callout just between two slides… well, I can’t do that right? I just want one and the same timeline for my entire recording.

Question 2: After the recording is done, is there a way to adjust the speed, or pause, certain segments of the recording? For example, if I realize that the viewer of my flash video needs a couple of seconds longer to read a certain callout, I want to “pause” or “extend” that point in the timeline for a bit. Can I do that, or do I need to record the entire thing from the beginning and actually pause myself at the appropriate time?


I’d be thankful for all advice and suggestions. I realize I’m new to this, so any nudges in the right direction would be appreciated!

/Tom

[jojolina]

Hey there Tom

From my experience, the only time I need full motion is during a drag & drop or scrolling type of action when the view "moves" like a film.
My suggestion is that you plan what you want to do (click here, then there, then select that button etc.)
Step 2 is to start a new project and select "Demonstration" as the recording type, spec the size of the recording window if needed and start recording (You might want to use auto capture which would automatically record all interactions and key strokes, but please remember to "manually" capture certain screens using Print Screen e.g. after a drop down menu has opened.) (Hint 2 - Rather record too many screens than miss one critical one out)
Step 3 would be to stop recording and edit the individual slides with captions, animations etc. At this stage, you can specify exactly how long each screen would display, when your captions etc appear and for how long they show.

In summary, a decently built demo has a seperate slide for each change in what the user would see on the screen, with FMR being used to "tie together" 2 views where a movement action causes the transition.

Hope this helps

Andrew

[Spotuser]

Thanks for the reply, I think I'm beginning to understand how Captivate is meant to work.
It's a bit tricky though, since our software is pretty much all about drag-n-drop, adjusting scroll-sliders and other "moving" interactivity that we want to show. So I really need to produce a smooth animation of this.

[jojolina]

Hi again Tom

No problem, the mind set that I tend to use is that every user interaction is a slide on its own, thus every individual drag & drop would be a slide, similarly all scrolling and highlighting etc. This helps a lot when it comes to editing and the "whoops!" factor becomes minimised if you only need to replace one faulty interaction or screen shot versus a slide full.

Andrew