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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.