Adobe Captivate Review and Screencasting Alternatives

Nov 4, 2007 (Click to Rate!) Loading ...

Adobe Captivate (Buy $699, Upgrade $299)

I met Captivate 3 years ago when it was RoboDemo 5. At that time I thought it was slick as hell to have a piece of software that would essentially capture your screen as screenshots as “slides”, and then capture any mouse or keyboard input as actions done during that “slide” and then you can assign the whole thing a time to display and add voice if you want… SLICK!

For the most part RoboDemo 5 worked as advertised. I did a few short movies with it, nothing fancy. I used the software for about 6 or 8 months before Macromedia bought it and it became Macromedia RoboDemo.

Naturally we upgraded to that version and almost nothing was different. Kept using RoboDemo for the rest of the years. Then Adobe came along and bought Macromedia, so suddenly RoboDemo needed to be renamed… this is when Adobe Captivate was born.

Captivate 1

We were doing a rash of new screencasts, so we upgraded (keep in mind, each time we “upgrade” it’s $300). This new “upgrade” was interesting… the layout was a little smoother than RoboDemo, a little stream lined but mostly the same. What we noticed right away though were the bugs… the unrelenting, un-work-aroundable bugs… bugs for the simplest operations (like copying a slide) to exporting a movie.

Captivate 1 would regularly hang, crash, peg the CPU and just generally suck. Continued posts to the Adobe support forums pointed out that Captivate wasn’t made to handle “movies that big”… at the time we were doing about 60-80 slide movies… total play time was around 11 minutes.

We resorted to a ridiculous hack of chopping the movies into “Sections” and making mini-projects out of them, then making a master-movie that injected the individual movies into it as slides containing an animation. The downside to this workaround is that suddenly the play controls (start/stop/pause) no longer worked while rendering individual animation “slides” which would run for a few minutes by themselves.

Eventually the bugs in this version made it impossible to work with, literally. I’m not exaggerating, we got to the point where we could no longer build and publish movies with any level of consistency due to bugs that caused the software to be unusable. Things like library objects getting lost or disconnected from the slides they were suppose to be on, to object timing and transitions rules being completely ignored. We also had plenty of cases of objects on slides simply not displaying once rendered, but during editing they showed up fine. That’s a common one.

Well it looked like at this time Adobe had released Captivate 2… so let’s try that and see where it gets us…

Captivate 2

So another $300 later, we have upgraded to Captivate 2. Our hope here is that we can continue to get back to working and see if things have improved.

After a week of working with the new software package I came to the following conclusions:

The layout was refined a bit more from Captivate 1
The bugs were just as prevalent as before, none of the previous ones having gotten fixed and more being added
The software was still unable to handle larger movies (60+ slides) with any sort of consistency
Adobe support was unable to help, as usual.
We quickly ran into cases where movies become unusable again, exporting different copies each time.

In relation to the last point, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We’ve been trying to record a lot of demos recently that are around 20 slides long. The slides contain drag-and-drop animations, which Captivate records as full-motion movies and injects on those slides.

We noticed that when we would render these movies out and watch them, the same (last in the file) animation would play for every animation segment… regardless of what we saw during the edit mode, regardless of what was shown while previewing inside the software, and regardless of what we imported into a new file trying to recover the project.

We also found out that adding audio to the slides creates a very different set of troubles that was just as fun and impossible to work around. For example, when adding audio to earlier slides in a presentation, it’s possible, only once published, that the resulting movie will loose audio for any number of random slides after that. Slides that during edit mode, have perfect good audio synced to them, and play during preview mode. Audio that worked prior in earlier published versions of the file… but for whatever reason, now will no longer work once published; identical to the animation-playing problem… totally unfixable and cannot be worked around.

Not to mention that slide-duplication and background copy-and-paste is broken, creating blank slides only once the movie is rendered, but not during editing. So you don’t know your movie is fucked until you publish it… brilliant!

Saturday afternoon was spent with 2 hours recording audio for a presentation we are working on, and no joke, 4.5 addition hrs publishing upwards of 20 different versions of the demonstration to figure out why each time it was a little different and not what I was seeing in the edit mode. Slides were missing audio, animations were no longer play OR had transitions assigned to them that I did not see in edit mode (e.g. fade-in/fade-out transitions for animations that shouldn’t have had them OR in 1 case, a fade-in-only transition on an animation that had no transition set on it, or it’s containing slide).

If the point hasn’t been made already, I’d like to point out that Adobe Captivate becomes impossible to use. On the outset, with the initial grab of the demo you plan on doing… it does a great job. It’s only once you get into the post-production mode of editing; working on timings, transitions, effects, audio, duplication, etc. that the software starts to fall apart.

It’s not just a matter of bugs with the exported movie… the bugs in the software itself while you use it run rampant. There is one bug that usually takes no more than 1 publish action to recreate and that is where mouse events are immediately consumed or mis-fired… this means trying to click menus, drag something, resize something, etc. is wholey impossible without a restart. If you click the File menu, it will disappear 500ms later. If you click on a timing segment to resize it, it will “unclick” about 250-500ms later. If you click to drag a panel bigger or to view a resource your mouse will “unclick” again… about 500ms later.

Another interesting bug is when adding objects to a slide, like an image, or copying an object from another slide, it will show at a certain layer of the slide, but when rendered will be invisible. No matter how much manipulation you do to the layering of that object, it will always be invisible until you restart the software and see that the software had infact placed it at the bottom layer. Only after a full restart can you reposition it and the new positioning actually be honored. (NOTE: If you have other instances of Captivate running, those have to be shut down as well, otherwise the restart won’t “count”… brilliant!)

Also if you like adjusting mouse paths, Captivate makes that an equally challenging task as during edit sessions mouse paths with either partially or entirely disappear from slides for editing, but still be there when you publish the final copy. Or another popular bug is for the beginning position of the mouth path to simply go crazy and default to position 0,0 or completely remove itself. Making the start/end position of the mouse on the slide, the exact same point, even though previously it was a full path.

True to older versions of Microsoft Office (Visio especially), the more you work on a file the more corrupt it gets over time, until you eventually get to the point that you can no longer work with it. The movies you are exporting don’t resemble the movie you see during edit mode at all and there is nothing you can do to recover it.

The steps I’ve tried to recover a movie:

Create a new empty movie, import all the slides from the old movie into it: FAILED
Create a new empty movie, copy-paste all the slides from the old movie into it: FAILED
Create a new empty movie, copy-paste a slide at a time from the old movie into it: FAILED
Save the existing movie as a new file: FAILED
Import the movie into Captivate 3 and try again: FAILED

Well now what do we do? What are our choices? Adobe has released Captivate 3, but in my short work with it I’ve seen identical behaviors as I saw with 2 once the work being done gets sufficiently long winded. The same bugs arose almost immediately and we just gave up trying to make this software work as advertised. The software is a brilliant concept, and if the bugs were ironed out and removed, I wouldn’t have a problem calling Adobe Captivate “the Photoshop of the screencast arena”… but it’s not. It’s buggy to a level that makes it unusable in environments where you need to create demonstrations that require more editing than simply the initial recording.

So now what? What other options exist?

Alternatives to Captivate

Don’t fret… there are alternatives to Captivate that are pretty damn good and you might want to give a look at. I will cover two of the best I’ve seen and what I found out about them below.

Qarbon’s Viewlet Builder 5 (Buy $399, Upgrade $199)

Viewlet Builder 5 is a great alternative that most closely matches Captivate. It captures input into editable inputs that overlay on top of the movie. It is also screen-shot based like Captivate. So for folks moving from Captivate you might want to look at Viewlet Builder first.

A smaller plus for Viewlet Builder is that you can tell the team is very much into design-as-art. The layout of the software is inherently smart from top to bottom and extremely polished. There are little touches that you only notice after you start using the software. For example, the expand/collapse button on the sashes stay anchored to the edges of the screen instead of moving with the sash’s position. This means you can keep your mouse in one position and quickly click to expand/collapse the sash. This also allows quick management of the interface by simply throwing your mouse up against the edge of the screen and clicking… as opposed to hovering around trying to target a 12px wide sash button.

While this particular example is a minor one, it does give you an idea of how polished this software is.

Another thing I loved about it, is that unlike Captivate, Viewlet Builder captures all the mouse input for a slide as a start/stop point that you can drag around and change. So if you want the mouse to move from a different location and end up clicking on another, you can control that. Captivate only lets you control where the mouse ends on a slide (assuming the mouse-path bug hasn’t removed it).

There are two things I didn’t like about Viewlet Builder, and they are:

Animations (like Drag and Drop) are captured very choppy. They are not captured as a full motion video like in Captivate, but instead as a series of screenshots which may not render as smoothly as you would like in the final movie.
NOT PRO/CON: This one is weird and some people may like this, but I didn’t. Keystrokes (like typing a name) are captured as editable time-segments button-by-button… making it impossible to easily make someone typing a name a sped-up segment of time for demo purposes.

UPDATE #1: Jay Lucke, CEO of Qarbon has replied to both of my critiques above, and it looks like #2 is easily worked around and #1 will be improved in the 5.1 beta, here is his full reply:

1) Choppy Drag & Drop…..

The default capture speed out of the box is 2fps, but in the option area of SmartCapture you
can increase this to 10fps (which is plenty for a realistic playback). We have seen the capture
engine bog a little on slower machines. We will be updating the engine in the 5.1.x releases to
work a little smoother for all CPUs as well as some other improvements.

2) KeyStroke capture

In SmartCapture, the default will capture keystroke entry, drag & drop, scrolling, etc. If you wanted
to have more control over this, you can choose to capture using the Manual setting rather than
SmartCapture..then you can control when VB takes the screenshots. You can force a manual
capture shot while in SmartCapture as well using the assigned HotKey, or click on the icon in the tool
tray to switch the mode entirely using the More option.

That 2nd one could be a pro for some people, I just didn’t see a way to turn it off and make it capture the entire input segment as an item I could slow down or speed up, like in Captivate.

Other than that, the software was great. It’s just shy of 1/2 the price of Captivate and they have done frequent releases of updates from what I’ve seen over the last few months. I cannot tell if they are cross platform because the new version 5 of their Viewlet Builder product has yet to see Linux/Mac releases, but their version 4 of the software does have that. So I would assume the software has gone Windows-only for the immediate future due to their demand from customers (it’s expensive to do cross platform dev, especially if alternative platforms only make up about 5% of your customers).

TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio (Buy $299, Upgrade $149)

Camtasia is another screencasting piece of software from TechSmith. For the folks that don’t know, TechSmith are the creators of the phenomenal SnagIt screenshot software. I’ve been using SnagIt for probably upwards of 3 years now and loved it every step of the way. I’ve never had it crash on me, I’ve never had it bug out on me or a screenshot turn out wrong due to some magical bug hidden deep in the software. As far as I’m concerned, this is a big pluse for Camtasia knowing it comes from the same folks that made SnagIt.

I haven’t spent a lot of time with Camtasia yet as my evaluation of it just started. I know that it’s designed around a different approach to screencast making than Captivate or Viewlet Builder, in that it actually renders your screen to a movie file… meaning all the actions you take and do on your desktop, including goofs, are all rendered out to a movie. You can annotate the movie after wards, and add voice of course, but as far as changing mouse gestures/paths or removing segments/screens of the movie that show goof ups, I’m not sure if you can do that.

I have spoken to someone that got quite good with Camtasia and loved it. He said that you can edit type sequences speed and the like so I’ll need to take another look at this software and see if it fits the bill. The price, again, is in the ballpark of both Captivate and Viewlet Builder, about $100 less than those packages so nothing hugely different there.

I will followup on the blog with information for anyone interested in this product and let you know how my evaluation went. If I can find another piece of software that allows us to continue working instead of spending 60%+ of our time working around bugs in the software, I will be happy.

If I can avoid giving Adobe $1 dollar for a 3rd generation piece of shit that they cannot get right, I’d love to. This entire experience is feeling very familiar to the Microsoft-lock-in-model… where so much of your resources are based around a proprietary piece of their software or data format, that year after year you shovel our money for new versions of their shit because you have no other choices. Naturally that would be the model any big corporation would gun for, and continue to do so… but my design to stop eating shit, day in and day out, while I pay for it is much stronger than my design to reshoot some of our movies.

Here’s to wishing me luck…

Share and Enjoy:

Adobe, buggy, Camtasia, Captivate, Macromedia, Opinion, Qarbon, review, RoboDemo, screencast, TechSmith, Viewlet Builder

This post was written by:

Riyad Kalla - who has written 1725 posts on The “Break it Down” Blog.

"Ultimately I just want to provide a resource that folks find useful."

43 Comments For This Post

sabrina Says:
November 4th, 2007 at 9:33 pm

Another good tool in this area is Wondershare DemoCreator, which creates software tutorial and presentation by recording screen, but more than a screen recorder, you can record all the actions taking on the application and then add some tips or instructions to it, even more, you can easily add the narration from microphone or import audio file directly. At last, you can publish it to Flash, auto-run CD, EXE, e-mail, ftp, LMS. As you know, flash file has smaller size and is safer for transmission, i think it will be useful for you!

You can try it for free to see if it works for what you need it for.
http://www.sameshow.com/demo-creator.html

Peter - Camtasia Guide Says:
November 5th, 2007 at 8:26 am

Let me know if you need any help when testing Camtasia. I would be happy to help

Peter – Camtasia Guide
http://www.camtasia-guide.com/

Riyad Kalla Says:
November 5th, 2007 at 8:38 am

Peter,
That’s a pretty sweet site, thanks for posting the link to it!

Would you happen to know the answers to my specific gripes with Camtasia above? For example, can you adjust the paths that mouse cursor takes during a movie, or edit how fast/slow someone types on a screen?

I was under the impression it’s all streamed out to a movie file, in which case I assumed not… but if Camtasia holds the movie in a separated state during editing (where your mouse input paths, keyboard input, etc. are all properties of a slide) then it might be possible?

Peter - Camtasia Guide Says:
November 5th, 2007 at 9:07 am

Hello Riyad,

Yes, it’s saved into a project file, but this project file is editable so you can make changes, slow clips down, move them around and so on.

For these specific tasks you couldn’t alter mouse movements afterwards, but you could use different call-outs to focus the attention to different parts of the screen. For example you could use a call-out looking like a mouse.

For editing the speed of typing you could de- or increase the “clip speed”. For example if a clip is 10 seconds you can easily change it to 5 or 20 seconds.

I hope that helped a bit

Peter – Camtasia Guide
http://www.camtasia-guide.com/

Riyad Kalla Says:
November 5th, 2007 at 9:09 am

Peter thanks for the followup!

Betsy Weber Says:
November 6th, 2007 at 5:52 pm

Hi Riyad,

I work for TechSmith. Peter is right – Camtasia Studio has an editor where you can delete portions of clips, add new clips and audio, zoom and pan, speed up and slow down video and lots of other special effects. You cannot alter your mouse movements after you record your video, but I will pass on your request to the product team.

I’d love to chat with you more and get your feedback. Drop me a line…

Betsy Weber, Chief Evangelist
TechSmith

Chris Says:
November 13th, 2007 at 3:08 am

Hi Riyad,
If you’re looking on our site, you’ll find TurboDemo to be a highly competitive alternative to the presented software. It is a high-quality screen capturing software and widely used.
If you’re looking more to screen recording of fluent movements, have a look at ALLCapture, which allows you also to disable/enable the mouse movement.
The sites are:
http://www.TurboDemo.com
http://www.ALLCapture.com

Your feedback is most welcome!

Chris

Riyad Kalla Says:
November 13th, 2007 at 7:29 am

Chris,
Thanks for the links. If you could give us some insight into how TurboDemo or AllCapture address my talking points in my original post, I (and the readers) would appreciate it.

Not having used the software before, I’m curious how input editing is done once the movie is captured, what performance is like for 10+ minute movies and so on.

Chris Says:
November 14th, 2007 at 2:29 am

Riyad,
TurboDemo works by capturing single screenshots (either automatically or by pressing a key) which can be edited afterwards as slides. You can insert various effects, copy, paste, hide, show slides and what is best is that you have a lot of output options available, e.g. Flash, Exe, Java, animated Gif, ASF and also Word and PDF. A special compression makes the demos small – 1 minute is about 100 KB.

ALLCapture on the other hand is very handy for recording screen activities in real-time which can be edited using a timeline similar to Flash. You can record multiple sound and can insert various elements to illustrate your video. It has very nice features such as the memory manager, which allows to record video footage for hours. You can export projects to different formats including flash and popular video formats. Size depends on the recorded action because ALLCapture intelligently “knows” how many frames are necessary to get a fluent recording.
On the sites I mentioned you can try out both and I’d be happy to hear any feedback from you.

Chinier Says:
December 4th, 2007 at 8:40 pm

Both Camtasia and Captivate are excellent, except too expensive, for choose, I will choose Democreator, which just need $69 with the similar function of Camtasia and Captivate.

View the created samples from: http://www.sameshow.com/democreator/create-software-demo-samples.html

Cheers!

Bent M. Madsen Says:
December 26th, 2007 at 2:44 am

Wink is an entirely free alternative to the tutorial programs mentioned in your post and the comments. It may not have as many extra features as some of the commercial alternatives, but it covers all the basic needs and then some. Furthermore is is lightweight (only 3 MB download file) and easy to use.

The program can be found here (the current development build 1060 fixes many bugs and is very stable):
http://debugmode.com/wink/

Opera (the browser) uses Wink for their tutorials:
http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/flash/

Other examples and support can be found in the forum:
http://debugmode.com/userforums/

Bent M. Madsen Says:
December 27th, 2007 at 2:12 am

Wink is an entirely free alternative to the tutorial/screencasting tools mentioned in the review and and previous comments. It does not have as many extra features as some of the other programs but it has all the basic features and then some. Furthermore it is lightweight (only 3 MB file to download) and easy to use.

Wink can be found on the following address (the latest development/alpha v2.0 build 1060 for Windows fixes many bugs and is very stable.):
http://debugmode.com/wink/

Opera (the browser) uses Wink for their tutorials:
http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/flash/

Other examples and support can be found at the forum:
http://debugmode.com/userforums/

ROBIN Says:
January 9th, 2008 at 11:34 pm

I am a little confused about why you
dont just save a version of the movie twice with
different names, and then pubish just one.
See if there is a problem, then go back
to the other version. simeple as pie

Riyad Kalla Says:
January 10th, 2008 at 6:24 am

Robin,
Yes you can certainly do that, and I do. One movie I did I have 7 hard copies of it because each copy had 1 bug or another from the other. So this strategy doesn’t help you work around any problem, it just raises your ods of getting a workable export.

Sort of like better on more squares in roulette. It doesn’t mean you win, but you have a better chance.

Yoo Says:
February 13th, 2008 at 1:19 pm

Hi,

Does anyone know how to zoom and pan in captivate? I’ve have seen captivate tutorials where this function is used, but never explained how to be used. I can only find the zoom function, which sucks. Can captivate zoom and pan like camtasia?

Cheers,
Yoo

Riyad Kalla Says:
February 13th, 2008 at 1:29 pm

Yoo,
According to this article it sounds like Captivate 2 added the Zoom/Pan feature… but like you, I have no idea where it is.

Leigh Says:
March 14th, 2008 at 10:45 am

Thanks for posting this Riyad. I use Captivate and am completely frustrated by the buggy publishing…the thing adds items that i’ve never added, removes items i’ve added, won’t center the freaken titles that are centered in the .cp file and that whole thing about having to close and reopen every five minutes makes me INSANE! Adobe’s service SUCKS; i called in to their support six months ago and was promised a call back that day…guess what. never called, the jerks.

I’m going to take a look at some of these other links that have been posted; I need to get my training authored without losing my mind.

Riyad Kalla Says:
March 14th, 2008 at 12:13 pm

Leigh,
I know how you feel. The two products listed above are excellent, it just depends what kind of demos you want to record.

If you like the slide-based approach that Captivate uses, you’ll want to grab Viewlet Builder… fi you want to record *movies* of what you are doing and maybe add some annotations after wards then Camtasia is the way to go.

Either way, both are very strong/polished apps.

Chris Says:
March 17th, 2008 at 12:48 am

Try out balesio’s Screen Capturing Suite and you have both in excellent quality – Slide based and full motion authoring possibilities with ALLCapture and TurboDemo.

Bob Says:
March 27th, 2008 at 10:32 am

I’m so glad you’ve posted this blog — so happy to know I’m not effing crazy. I hate, hate, hate, hate, Captivate. I’ve been working with 2.0 trying to put together an 70 slide movie for a product demonstration and have run into all the same issues. Audio being cut, removed, replaced, corrupted. I finally thought I’d finished my project and after all that work (probably 30 hrs or so), it’s a complete mess. All the audio at the beginning is mis-spliced, repeated or just missing. They should not sell this tool.

Riyad Kalla Says:
March 27th, 2008 at 11:10 am

Bob that is a hair-ripping experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyone… you are on a deadline, working your ass off, getting close and according to the “preview” inside of Captivate you are good to go.

You publish the movie and it’s completely fucked up and there is *nothing* to fix as far as you can tell from inside Captivate because it doesn’t show you the same thing it writes out.

I’m really sorry to hear that you ran into that, but I’m glad this blog post helped let you know that you weren’t going insane and didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just how Captivate works

If you do decide to go with either Viewlet Builder or Captivate keep us posted, let us know which one you decide on.

Meg Says:
June 18th, 2008 at 2:08 pm

Riyad, I’m so glad you posted this. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one cursing this program (while at work). I have to add, though, that I have had very negative experiences with Viewlet because of the HUGE file size output. I’ve gotten something like 4 or 5 times the file size for the same recording. And here at work, file size is an issue on the infrastructure. Having said that, it may be just the person who produced the Viewlet not knowing how to shrink it down. I have heard good things about Camtasia, too. I’m hoping to get to try it out soon.

Riyad Kalla Says:
June 18th, 2008 at 3:18 pm

Meg,
I’m really glad the article helped you.

To address the file-size issue though, Viewlet Builder is going to almost always give you smaller files sizes. We are using Camtasia a lot at work now and because it is movie-based, and not screenshot based, to try and export a movie at a half-way decent resolution/frame-rate you end up with some pretty huge flash movies. For example, I did a 5-min introduction to a new product we released and it was a 32mb Flash movie.

One of the things to watch with Viewlet Builder is to set the color-depth of your captures, setting it to 16-bit can help shrink the size of your captures and another trick I learned with Captivate is that if you have multiple slides that actually have the exact same background (maybe you are just changing different annotations on each slide) you can copy and paste the same background resource between all 3 slides so all 3 use the same screenshot instead of 3 separate screenshots that are identical.

** You might want to check with the Viewlet Builder team about that last tip, but I’m pretty sure it works.

Also the VB team is getting ready to release 6.1, I got a chance to play with it, and it’s pretty smooth. They improved input capturing as well as handling transition effects in the native UI a bit more.

I really have two takes on these two separate products:

Viewlet Builder: Screenshot-based, easy recording, but a lot of post-production work to refine. You can change mouse movements, speed, and it’s easier to narrate and time.

Camtasia: Movie-based, complex recording requiring a lot of up-front planning, almost no post-production work. It’s harder to narrate and effect timing and cannot change any inputs after the fact.

It really depends on how you work and what you are recording… I think I prefer the screenshot-based approach, but if you are trying to capture smooth effects and animations or motion in your UI, then the movie-approach is better.

I would honest-to-god suggest you trial both pieces of software, recording the exact same scenario, and see what you like better.

kal Says:
July 6th, 2008 at 4:19 am

hi all
i’ve been using VB since version2. The easiest piece of software to create elearning content, and teach to others when the orginal software is not available. I created 80+ slides in one go and it compiled beautifully without breaking the system or me! Took me less than an hour! Added a few crisp explanations thro notes / callouts… It was on a topic that needed to be learnt by several thousand people in my organization perfectly. And whoever went thro it once, understood it perfectly. The only small prob was the right version of Java Runtime needed to be available then, so I used to have a simple text file giving the requirements. Though I tried several other products, somehow my love for VB has grown with every later version. Qarbon’s quiz product needs improvement, I love the Quizcreator. Recently I taught Quizcreator to a bunch of domain experts, and they were up and running in a matter of just 5 minutes, that is what we call ease of use.

krista Says:
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:18 pm

For an upcoming project, I will need to capture DOS screen keyboard input that uses Function and Control keys. Do any of these tools allow you to capture this type of user input without interrupting capture of a simulation?

Editor Says:
September 4th, 2008 at 9:29 am

Krista,

Capturing the DOS screen keyboard input if it’s being run inside a CMD window in normal Windows (Start > Run > ‘cmd’ for example) should be fine, Camtasia can do this for sure because it just captures video, so it will capture you *typing* that in as a video. Viewlet Builder probably allows you to do this, but you might want to grab the trial and just double-check to make sure.

Maryanne Mills Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 6:10 am

When the learner takes the Captivate lesson on how to use the DOS System, will there be issues during playback if they have to say press the F3 key or Alt + P?

Editor Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 8:07 am

Maryanne,

You mean the learner needs to press something to answer a quiz or continue? In that case Captivate will be capturing the input from the learner and displaying a *movie* of the console, not the actual console. So there is no DOS window to capture that input, it will all be Captivate (and some form of user-input you may have embedded in the movie, like a quiz or something).

Maryanne Mills Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 8:36 am

I understand that is will be displaying the “movie” and not the actual DOS application. But for example, if the learner needs to press the Tab key, or the right arrow key, or the F3 key, during the simulation, will these keys function properly within the simulation?

Editor Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 10:55 am

Maryanne,

I haven’t tried this directly in Captivate, but yes I believe it will work, as the Flash application that Captivate creates will have the input focus and should get key events for any of those keys pressed.

Naturally the best thing here would be to try and create a quick Captivate project that uses these input chars to make sure it works, or email Captivate support directly (I don’t want to unknowingly mislead you, I’ve just not tried it).

Tim Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 8:23 pm

I think DemoCreator is quite similar with Captive. It is great for its powerful function and its reasonable price. http://www.sameshow.com/demo-creator.html

ayse Says:
September 30th, 2008 at 8:28 am

Hello everyone,

I have started working with captivate3, 2 weeks ago. My first demo recording was fine. Then I started recording one after another, not really going back and looking into the details. and now i realize half of the slides are not there. they just disappeared. this sucks. now i started again. it does the same thing with smaller recordings. i don’t know how to deal with it.

Editor Says:
September 30th, 2008 at 8:41 am

ayse,
Unfortunately none of us did… in all my time using Captivate 1, 2 or 3 I never found a way to successfully recover a broken movie. I tried many different things (like copy paste, reimporting slides, etc.) and never found a way to do it.

While the Captivate interface might be nice, the software has been garbage for a long time and I don’t see Adobe actually fixing it, I don’t think they make much money on it and likely don’t have a very big dev team behind it.

Jan Says:
December 4th, 2008 at 8:07 am

I am trying to solve two cases:

I need some SW like Captivate 3 to create screen recording and make interactive quizes in one presentation.
I tried to create some things in Captivate but as I see the forum of Adobe Captivate – the people complain mostly – the SW has lot of bugs and is quite expensive.

So please let me know if you know some SW which can do nearly the same like Captivate.

I cannot find it – I tried it many times.

I know Wink, Camtasia,… but as far I know they cannot create interactive quiz inside one project like by Captivate is.

Thanks Jan

Chris Says:
December 4th, 2008 at 8:31 am

Hi Jan,

Check out TurboDemo on http://www.TurboDemo.com – you can do everything with it, also interactivity and quizzes plus it is far cheaper than captivate.

best regards,
Chris

Riyad Kalla Says:
December 4th, 2008 at 8:51 am

Jan,

In addition to evaluating what Chris suggested, I’d strongly recommend you check out ViewletBuilder as evaluated above. It is the closest match to Captivate and includes a lot of the same building tools for quizes and interactive learning.

It does look like you would need the Enterprise Version as that supports the integrated quizes.

Jan Says:
December 7th, 2008 at 10:27 am

Thank you for the recommendation.
I will think about it.
Maybe I will use Camtasia studio for screen recording and the tests I will create in Flash by ma self.
But what I like by Captivate, You can use it together with quizzes and this is more comfortable for me, so I will see.
Maybe the Captivate will be a winner form me, I have to think about it.

theHire Says:
December 15th, 2008 at 3:13 pm

Another screencasting alternative is IgniteCAST.com, which is a web 2.0 site that works with a screen capture tool called Ignite. It’s easy to use, once you download it and try creating some courses and slideshows. You can add videos and publish in tons of formats as well, web server, SCORM, Playstation, mp4, etc. The native IgniteCAST output looks really good compared to a flat video.

Green Chan Says:
March 26th, 2009 at 1:39 am

Now Captive have upgraded to 4.0 with the Text to Speech feature.
Camtasia 6.0 have added the HD recording.
DemoCreator 2.5 now is with the zoom-n-pan feature and easier editing.

NickInZim Says:
September 15th, 2009 at 2:38 am

Well, to start off, I was quite surprised, reading your comments; no-one really seems to like Captivate at all! Now, before people start jumping up and down on me in rage and yelling at me in disbelief, let me explain my experiences:

I used Captivate 1 for about a year and a half, but have never had any of the problems described… I never used the sound option, which may be part of the reason, but I have made projects that were anything up to 100 slides, though more commonly, there are about 40-60 slides and anywhere from 3-30 minutes in length.

My PC is a P4 2.8Ghz, 256Mb RAM computer, nothing fancy. BTW Captivate 4 requires minimum 512Mb RAM, so beware!

The only problems I’ve had are the upgrade process from Captivate 1 to Captivate 4, Adobe really do have atrocious customer service (although they “sometimes” seemed to make an effort, no, no call backs either), and colour depth issues. The colour depth issue I’m talking about is the fact that no matter how I tried, I always had problems if I wanted to change a “single” background; it always came out looking bad…

It would have driven me nuts if I’d had your problems, and I can’t say how relieved I am to find that though there seem to be so many who have had them, it doesn’t include me I am doing the e-learning program for our software (Payroll), and would not be pleased if I had to redo things because of some stupid software.

The upgrade to Captivate 4 doesn’t seem that much of an advantage to me. From what I’ve seen: Quizzes support is improved, it now integrates with more systems, and there are a few more question styles. There’s the TOC now. Closed Captions, etc. To me it wasn’t worth the upgrade of $399. My boss however insisted, and even though I wanted to move to another system (yes, no problems, but the fee was steep!) he decided that since we had already begun to use it, we would carry on using it…

Personally, I say shop around! When I buy a new cellphone I make damn sure that it’s a good one before I buy it. Test all these pieces of software first. It’s possible that even though Software X does not allow you to integrate/aggregate tests and learning into one project (one thing I really like about Captivate!), you may be able to call/run the quiz at the end of the learning. It may even be you like one for learning, and one for quizzes!

I am not really a fan of Adobe products, so I’m not just trying to put down badmouthing of a product (I do however REALLY like Macromedia/Adobe Freehand).

Thanks for the great review, I have bookmarked this page and if/when we need to change provider, I will keep in mind all the suggestions.

Riyad Kalla Says:
September 17th, 2009 at 10:54 am

Nick I’m glad to hear that you haven’t run into these issues — they really are suicide-inducing… the type of experience that gets you to post your resume on Monster.com just so you can get away from it

I will say that I’ve never seen a development *passion* out of a company like I have from Qarbon. Their sole purpose for existing is to write fantastic software it seems, the CEO doesn’t move anything forward until it’s been developed, polished and tweaked to the point of perfection.

If at some point you need to shop around for an alternative, I have no qualms recommending Qarbon’s Viewlet Builder — they’ve never paid me a dime, this is just my 2 cents for you incase you find yourself in a bind.

CatiaTrain Says:
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:49 pm

Nick, Qarbon’s Viewlet builder is good, but you might try Scate Ignite 4. It is super ease to use and re-edit. I think the url is http://www.scateignite.com. Cheers!

Riyad Kalla Says:
October 5th, 2009 at 7:45 am

In the interest in honesty, CatiaTrain is from Scate.

Catia, there is nothing wrong with filling us in on why Ignite might be a good/solid choice for screen-casting. Give us some pointers on the cooler features in the software.

I’m personally curious if it’s a slide-based approach like Viewlet Builder and Captivate, or if it’s movie-based like Camtasia.

sabrina Says:
November 4th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Another good tool in this area is Wondershare DemoCreator, which creates software tutorial and presentation by recording screen, but more than a screen recorder, you can record all the actions taking on the application and then add some tips or instructions to it, even more, you can easily add the narration from microphone or import audio file directly. At last, you can publish it to Flash, auto-run CD, EXE, e-mail, ftp, LMS. As you know, flash file has smaller size and is safer for transmission, i think it will be useful for you!

You can try it for free to see if it works for what you need it for.
http://www.sameshow.com/demo-creator.html
Peter - Camtasia Guide Says:
November 5th, 2007 at 8:26 am
Let me know if you need any help when testing Camtasia. I would be happy to help

Peter – Camtasia Guide
http://www.camtasia-guide.com/
Riyad Kalla Says:
November 5th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Peter,
That’s a pretty sweet site, thanks for posting the link to it!

Would you happen to know the answers to my specific gripes with Camtasia above? For example, can you adjust the paths that mouse cursor takes during a movie, or edit how fast/slow someone types on a screen?

I was under the impression it’s all streamed out to a movie file, in which case I assumed not… but if Camtasia holds the movie in a separated state during editing (where your mouse input paths, keyboard input, etc. are all properties of a slide) then it might be possible?
Peter - Camtasia Guide Says:
November 5th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Hello Riyad,

Yes, it’s saved into a project file, but this project file is editable so you can make changes, slow clips down, move them around and so on.

For these specific tasks you couldn’t alter mouse movements afterwards, but you could use different call-outs to focus the attention to different parts of the screen. For example you could use a call-out looking like a mouse.

For editing the speed of typing you could de- or increase the “clip speed”. For example if a clip is 10 seconds you can easily change it to 5 or 20 seconds.

I hope that helped a bit

Peter – Camtasia Guide
http://www.camtasia-guide.com/
Riyad Kalla Says:
November 5th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Peter thanks for the followup!
Betsy Weber Says:
November 6th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Hi Riyad,

I work for TechSmith. Peter is right – Camtasia Studio has an editor where you can delete portions of clips, add new clips and audio, zoom and pan, speed up and slow down video and lots of other special effects. You cannot alter your mouse movements after you record your video, but I will pass on your request to the product team.

I’d love to chat with you more and get your feedback. Drop me a line…

Betsy Weber, Chief Evangelist
TechSmith
Chris Says:
November 13th, 2007 at 3:08 am
Hi Riyad,
If you’re looking on our site, you’ll find TurboDemo to be a highly competitive alternative to the presented software. It is a high-quality screen capturing software and widely used.
If you’re looking more to screen recording of fluent movements, have a look at ALLCapture, which allows you also to disable/enable the mouse movement.
The sites are:
http://www.TurboDemo.com
http://www.ALLCapture.com

Your feedback is most welcome!

Chris
Riyad Kalla Says:
November 13th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Chris,
Thanks for the links. If you could give us some insight into how TurboDemo or AllCapture address my talking points in my original post, I (and the readers) would appreciate it.

Not having used the software before, I’m curious how input editing is done once the movie is captured, what performance is like for 10+ minute movies and so on.
Chris Says:
November 14th, 2007 at 2:29 am
Riyad,
TurboDemo works by capturing single screenshots (either automatically or by pressing a key) which can be edited afterwards as slides. You can insert various effects, copy, paste, hide, show slides and what is best is that you have a lot of output options available, e.g. Flash, Exe, Java, animated Gif, ASF and also Word and PDF. A special compression makes the demos small – 1 minute is about 100 KB.

ALLCapture on the other hand is very handy for recording screen activities in real-time which can be edited using a timeline similar to Flash. You can record multiple sound and can insert various elements to illustrate your video. It has very nice features such as the memory manager, which allows to record video footage for hours. You can export projects to different formats including flash and popular video formats. Size depends on the recorded action because ALLCapture intelligently “knows” how many frames are necessary to get a fluent recording.
On the sites I mentioned you can try out both and I’d be happy to hear any feedback from you.
Chinier Says:
December 4th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Both Camtasia and Captivate are excellent, except too expensive, for choose, I will choose Democreator, which just need $69 with the similar function of Camtasia and Captivate.

View the created samples from: http://www.sameshow.com/democreator/create-software-demo-samples.html

Cheers!
Bent M. Madsen Says:
December 26th, 2007 at 2:44 am
Wink is an entirely free alternative to the tutorial programs mentioned in your post and the comments. It may not have as many extra features as some of the commercial alternatives, but it covers all the basic needs and then some. Furthermore is is lightweight (only 3 MB download file) and easy to use.

The program can be found here (the current development build 1060 fixes many bugs and is very stable):
http://debugmode.com/wink/

Opera (the browser) uses Wink for their tutorials:
http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/flash/

Other examples and support can be found in the forum:
http://debugmode.com/userforums/
Bent M. Madsen Says:
December 27th, 2007 at 2:12 am
Wink is an entirely free alternative to the tutorial/screencasting tools mentioned in the review and and previous comments. It does not have as many extra features as some of the other programs but it has all the basic features and then some. Furthermore it is lightweight (only 3 MB file to download) and easy to use.

Wink can be found on the following address (the latest development/alpha v2.0 build 1060 for Windows fixes many bugs and is very stable.):
http://debugmode.com/wink/

Opera (the browser) uses Wink for their tutorials:
http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/flash/

Other examples and support can be found at the forum:
http://debugmode.com/userforums/
ROBIN Says:
January 9th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
I am a little confused about why you
dont just save a version of the movie twice with
different names, and then pubish just one.
See if there is a problem, then go back
to the other version. simeple as pie
Riyad Kalla Says:
January 10th, 2008 at 6:24 am
Robin,
Yes you can certainly do that, and I do. One movie I did I have 7 hard copies of it because each copy had 1 bug or another from the other. So this strategy doesn’t help you work around any problem, it just raises your ods of getting a workable export.

Sort of like better on more squares in roulette. It doesn’t mean you win, but you have a better chance.
Yoo Says:
February 13th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Hi,

Does anyone know how to zoom and pan in captivate? I’ve have seen captivate tutorials where this function is used, but never explained how to be used. I can only find the zoom function, which sucks. Can captivate zoom and pan like camtasia?

Cheers,
Yoo
Riyad Kalla Says:
February 13th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Yoo,
According to this article it sounds like Captivate 2 added the Zoom/Pan feature… but like you, I have no idea where it is.
Leigh Says:
March 14th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Thanks for posting this Riyad. I use Captivate and am completely frustrated by the buggy publishing…the thing adds items that i’ve never added, removes items i’ve added, won’t center the freaken titles that are centered in the .cp file and that whole thing about having to close and reopen every five minutes makes me INSANE! Adobe’s service SUCKS; i called in to their support six months ago and was promised a call back that day…guess what. never called, the jerks.

I’m going to take a look at some of these other links that have been posted; I need to get my training authored without losing my mind.
Riyad Kalla Says:
March 14th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Leigh,
I know how you feel. The two products listed above are excellent, it just depends what kind of demos you want to record.

If you like the slide-based approach that Captivate uses, you’ll want to grab Viewlet Builder… fi you want to record *movies* of what you are doing and maybe add some annotations after wards then Camtasia is the way to go.

Either way, both are very strong/polished apps.
Chris Says:
March 17th, 2008 at 12:48 am
Try out balesio’s Screen Capturing Suite and you have both in excellent quality – Slide based and full motion authoring possibilities with ALLCapture and TurboDemo.
Bob Says:
March 27th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I’m so glad you’ve posted this blog — so happy to know I’m not effing crazy. I hate, hate, hate, hate, Captivate. I’ve been working with 2.0 trying to put together an 70 slide movie for a product demonstration and have run into all the same issues. Audio being cut, removed, replaced, corrupted. I finally thought I’d finished my project and after all that work (probably 30 hrs or so), it’s a complete mess. All the audio at the beginning is mis-spliced, repeated or just missing. They should not sell this tool.
Riyad Kalla Says:
March 27th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Bob that is a hair-ripping experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyone… you are on a deadline, working your ass off, getting close and according to the “preview” inside of Captivate you are good to go.

You publish the movie and it’s completely fucked up and there is *nothing* to fix as far as you can tell from inside Captivate because it doesn’t show you the same thing it writes out.

I’m really sorry to hear that you ran into that, but I’m glad this blog post helped let you know that you weren’t going insane and didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just how Captivate works

If you do decide to go with either Viewlet Builder or Captivate keep us posted, let us know which one you decide on.
Meg Says:
June 18th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Riyad, I’m so glad you posted this. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one cursing this program (while at work). I have to add, though, that I have had very negative experiences with Viewlet because of the HUGE file size output. I’ve gotten something like 4 or 5 times the file size for the same recording. And here at work, file size is an issue on the infrastructure. Having said that, it may be just the person who produced the Viewlet not knowing how to shrink it down. I have heard good things about Camtasia, too. I’m hoping to get to try it out soon.
Riyad Kalla Says:
June 18th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Meg,
I’m really glad the article helped you.

To address the file-size issue though, Viewlet Builder is going to almost always give you smaller files sizes. We are using Camtasia a lot at work now and because it is movie-based, and not screenshot based, to try and export a movie at a half-way decent resolution/frame-rate you end up with some pretty huge flash movies. For example, I did a 5-min introduction to a new product we released and it was a 32mb Flash movie.

One of the things to watch with Viewlet Builder is to set the color-depth of your captures, setting it to 16-bit can help shrink the size of your captures and another trick I learned with Captivate is that if you have multiple slides that actually have the exact same background (maybe you are just changing different annotations on each slide) you can copy and paste the same background resource between all 3 slides so all 3 use the same screenshot instead of 3 separate screenshots that are identical.

** You might want to check with the Viewlet Builder team about that last tip, but I’m pretty sure it works.

Also the VB team is getting ready to release 6.1, I got a chance to play with it, and it’s pretty smooth. They improved input capturing as well as handling transition effects in the native UI a bit more.

I really have two takes on these two separate products:

Viewlet Builder: Screenshot-based, easy recording, but a lot of post-production work to refine. You can change mouse movements, speed, and it’s easier to narrate and time.

Camtasia: Movie-based, complex recording requiring a lot of up-front planning, almost no post-production work. It’s harder to narrate and effect timing and cannot change any inputs after the fact.

It really depends on how you work and what you are recording… I think I prefer the screenshot-based approach, but if you are trying to capture smooth effects and animations or motion in your UI, then the movie-approach is better.

I would honest-to-god suggest you trial both pieces of software, recording the exact same scenario, and see what you like better.
kal Says:
July 6th, 2008 at 4:19 am
hi all
i’ve been using VB since version2. The easiest piece of software to create elearning content, and teach to others when the orginal software is not available. I created 80+ slides in one go and it compiled beautifully without breaking the system or me! Took me less than an hour! Added a few crisp explanations thro notes / callouts… It was on a topic that needed to be learnt by several thousand people in my organization perfectly. And whoever went thro it once, understood it perfectly. The only small prob was the right version of Java Runtime needed to be available then, so I used to have a simple text file giving the requirements. Though I tried several other products, somehow my love for VB has grown with every later version. Qarbon’s quiz product needs improvement, I love the Quizcreator. Recently I taught Quizcreator to a bunch of domain experts, and they were up and running in a matter of just 5 minutes, that is what we call ease of use.
krista Says:
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:18 pm
For an upcoming project, I will need to capture DOS screen keyboard input that uses Function and Control keys. Do any of these tools allow you to capture this type of user input without interrupting capture of a simulation?
Editor Says:
September 4th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Krista,

Capturing the DOS screen keyboard input if it’s being run inside a CMD window in normal Windows (Start > Run > ‘cmd’ for example) should be fine, Camtasia can do this for sure because it just captures video, so it will capture you *typing* that in as a video. Viewlet Builder probably allows you to do this, but you might want to grab the trial and just double-check to make sure.
Maryanne Mills Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 6:10 am
When the learner takes the Captivate lesson on how to use the DOS System, will there be issues during playback if they have to say press the F3 key or Alt + P?
Editor Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Maryanne,

You mean the learner needs to press something to answer a quiz or continue? In that case Captivate will be capturing the input from the learner and displaying a *movie* of the console, not the actual console. So there is no DOS window to capture that input, it will all be Captivate (and some form of user-input you may have embedded in the movie, like a quiz or something).
Maryanne Mills Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 8:36 am
I understand that is will be displaying the “movie” and not the actual DOS application. But for example, if the learner needs to press the Tab key, or the right arrow key, or the F3 key, during the simulation, will these keys function properly within the simulation?
Editor Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Maryanne,

I haven’t tried this directly in Captivate, but yes I believe it will work, as the Flash application that Captivate creates will have the input focus and should get key events for any of those keys pressed.

Naturally the best thing here would be to try and create a quick Captivate project that uses these input chars to make sure it works, or email Captivate support directly (I don’t want to unknowingly mislead you, I’ve just not tried it).
Tim Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
I think DemoCreator is quite similar with Captive. It is great for its powerful function and its reasonable price. http://www.sameshow.com/demo-creator.html
ayse Says:
September 30th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Hello everyone,

I have started working with captivate3, 2 weeks ago. My first demo recording was fine. Then I started recording one after another, not really going back and looking into the details. and now i realize half of the slides are not there. they just disappeared. this sucks. now i started again. it does the same thing with smaller recordings. i don’t know how to deal with it.
Editor Says:
September 30th, 2008 at 8:41 am
ayse,
Unfortunately none of us did… in all my time using Captivate 1, 2 or 3 I never found a way to successfully recover a broken movie. I tried many different things (like copy paste, reimporting slides, etc.) and never found a way to do it.

While the Captivate interface might be nice, the software has been garbage for a long time and I don’t see Adobe actually fixing it, I don’t think they make much money on it and likely don’t have a very big dev team behind it.
Jan Says:
December 4th, 2008 at 8:07 am
I am trying to solve two cases:

I need some SW like Captivate 3 to create screen recording and make interactive quizes in one presentation.
I tried to create some things in Captivate but as I see the forum of Adobe Captivate – the people complain mostly – the SW has lot of bugs and is quite expensive.

So please let me know if you know some SW which can do nearly the same like Captivate.

I cannot find it – I tried it many times.

I know Wink, Camtasia,… but as far I know they cannot create interactive quiz inside one project like by Captivate is.

Thanks Jan
Chris Says:
December 4th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Hi Jan,

Check out TurboDemo on http://www.TurboDemo.com – you can do everything with it, also interactivity and quizzes plus it is far cheaper than captivate.

best regards,
Chris
Riyad Kalla Says:
December 4th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Jan,

In addition to evaluating what Chris suggested, I’d strongly recommend you check out ViewletBuilder as evaluated above. It is the closest match to Captivate and includes a lot of the same building tools for quizes and interactive learning.

It does look like you would need the Enterprise Version as that supports the integrated quizes.
Jan Says:
December 7th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Thank you for the recommendation.
I will think about it.
Maybe I will use Camtasia studio for screen recording and the tests I will create in Flash by ma self.
But what I like by Captivate, You can use it together with quizzes and this is more comfortable for me, so I will see.
Maybe the Captivate will be a winner form me, I have to think about it.
theHire Says:
December 15th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Another screencasting alternative is IgniteCAST.com, which is a web 2.0 site that works with a screen capture tool called Ignite. It’s easy to use, once you download it and try creating some courses and slideshows. You can add videos and publish in tons of formats as well, web server, SCORM, Playstation, mp4, etc. The native IgniteCAST output looks really good compared to a flat video.
Green Chan Says:
March 26th, 2009 at 1:39 am
Now Captive have upgraded to 4.0 with the Text to Speech feature.
Camtasia 6.0 have added the HD recording.
DemoCreator 2.5 now is with the zoom-n-pan feature and easier editing.
NickInZim Says:
September 15th, 2009 at 2:38 am
Well, to start off, I was quite surprised, reading your comments; no-one really seems to like Captivate at all! Now, before people start jumping up and down on me in rage and yelling at me in disbelief, let me explain my experiences:

I used Captivate 1 for about a year and a half, but have never had any of the problems described… I never used the sound option, which may be part of the reason, but I have made projects that were anything up to 100 slides, though more commonly, there are about 40-60 slides and anywhere from 3-30 minutes in length.

My PC is a P4 2.8Ghz, 256Mb RAM computer, nothing fancy. BTW Captivate 4 requires minimum 512Mb RAM, so beware!

The only problems I’ve had are the upgrade process from Captivate 1 to Captivate 4, Adobe really do have atrocious customer service (although they “sometimes” seemed to make an effort, no, no call backs either), and colour depth issues. The colour depth issue I’m talking about is the fact that no matter how I tried, I always had problems if I wanted to change a “single” background; it always came out looking bad…

It would have driven me nuts if I’d had your problems, and I can’t say how relieved I am to find that though there seem to be so many who have had them, it doesn’t include me I am doing the e-learning program for our software (Payroll), and would not be pleased if I had to redo things because of some stupid software.

The upgrade to Captivate 4 doesn’t seem that much of an advantage to me. From what I’ve seen: Quizzes support is improved, it now integrates with more systems, and there are a few more question styles. There’s the TOC now. Closed Captions, etc. To me it wasn’t worth the upgrade of $399. My boss however insisted, and even though I wanted to move to another system (yes, no problems, but the fee was steep!) he decided that since we had already begun to use it, we would carry on using it…

Personally, I say shop around! When I buy a new cellphone I make damn sure that it’s a good one before I buy it. Test all these pieces of software first. It’s possible that even though Software X does not allow you to integrate/aggregate tests and learning into one project (one thing I really like about Captivate!), you may be able to call/run the quiz at the end of the learning. It may even be you like one for learning, and one for quizzes!

I am not really a fan of Adobe products, so I’m not just trying to put down badmouthing of a product (I do however REALLY like Macromedia/Adobe Freehand).

Thanks for the great review, I have bookmarked this page and if/when we need to change provider, I will keep in mind all the suggestions.
Riyad Kalla Says:
September 17th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Nick I’m glad to hear that you haven’t run into these issues — they really are suicide-inducing… the type of experience that gets you to post your resume on Monster.com just so you can get away from it

I will say that I’ve never seen a development *passion* out of a company like I have from Qarbon. Their sole purpose for existing is to write fantastic software it seems, the CEO doesn’t move anything forward until it’s been developed, polished and tweaked to the point of perfection.

If at some point you need to shop around for an alternative, I have no qualms recommending Qarbon’s Viewlet Builder — they’ve never paid me a dime, this is just my 2 cents for you incase you find yourself in a bind.
CatiaTrain Says:
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Nick, Qarbon’s Viewlet builder is good, but you might try Scate Ignite 4. It is super ease to use and re-edit. I think the url is http://www.scateignite.com. Cheers!
Riyad Kalla Says:
October 5th, 2009 at 7:45 am
In the interest in honesty, CatiaTrain is from Scate.

Catia, there is nothing wrong with filling us in on why Ignite might be a good/solid choice for screen-casting. Give us some pointers on the cooler features in the software.

I’m personally curious if it’s a slide-based approach like Viewlet Builder and Captivate, or if it’s movie-based like Camtasia.

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