dobe Captivate 2 is generally competent and frequently brilliant, but like all programs, has some potholes you need to avoid on the path to high-quality and efficient production. OK, I’ll admit there were some features I felt were way off the mark, and some grumbles Adobe needs to address. Overall, however, it’s at least a “must download” for anyone creating application-based screen cams, online quizzes, or simulations, And don’t be surprised if you quickly find it invaluable as a standalone tool or a way to supplement video training materials.
Captivate performs two distinct functions married by a logical and intuitive interface and feature set. The first is to capture screens from a software application to create training or demonstrations; the second is to create digital quizzes and simulations. I’ll discuss each in turn.
Screen Capture-Based Projects
In screen-capture operations, Captivate works in one of three modes: Demonstration, Training Simulation, or Assessment Simulation, or you can customize the settings to your own liking. In Training Simulation mode, your goal is to simulate the operation of the program that you’re capturing, so the viewer can click and type as if actually running the program.
So you choose to add click boxes and text-entry boxes to track viewer input, and decline to show mouse location and movements, or text captions, since these would provide unwanted hints to the viewers. In contrast, in a presentation that demonstrates the software to the viewer, click boxes and text-entry boxes are irrelevant, but you definitely want mouse movements and text captions.
Once you choose your options, you choose the application to record, and whether to record narration while capturing your screens. Unlike the first version of Captivate, which couldn’t capture narration on my HP XW4300 test system (or any other computer using the same on-board audio chipset), Captivate 2 captured narration with no problem. To test screen-capture operation, I created a three-minute demonstration of Pinnacle Studio, a consumer-software nonlinear video editor.
Object Orientation
Unlike other screen-capture programs, like Camtasia, that capture a single large file with video, audio, mouse clicks, and motion, Captivate captures multiple slides, each containing a new snapshot of the application. For example, open a menu, and Captivate captures a new screen. My Studio project required 53 separate slides. In addition, each slide contains “objects” that encapsulate mouse movements, clicks, and audio, to which Captivate automatically adds other elements taken from the program itself, like menu commands and tool tips.
On the timeline atop the interface, you see tracks for the mouse movement, a text caption, a highlight box (showing the control about to be clicked), and audio, all of which you can edit separately. Note that Captivate captures or creates many text messages like "Select Project Preferences Menu" automatically, saving gobs of time compared to programs that make you add them manually.
This object orientation enables Captivate to easily create complex training and simulation assessments that are beyond screen-capture programs like Camtasia Studio. Also, if you add or delete a slide, Captivate will automatically adjust mouse movements so that they always appear smooth, which is almost impossible to achieve when editing Camtasia-based videos.
Note that while Captivate “understands” menu operations, and can “force” users to click menus during simulations, it doesn’t understand drag and drop. Specifically, even though it captures the motion perfectly during screen recording, it can’t monitor this activity during a simulation. For example, in Studio, I could create a simulation that forces the student to click File then Open to import a video file, but couldn’t monitor if a viewer drags that video to the timeline. If you have a program that relies heavily on drag-and-drop operation, this deficit will limit your ability to create training or assessment simulations.
Zoom and Other New Features
Probably my biggest objection to the new version is the way Adobe has implemented the zoom function. The classic use of zoom-in screen cams is to zoom in to highlight an important section of the interface—say a dialog box—to provide a closer view. Alternatively, zoom allows you to capture a 1024x768 application, and effectively display it in a smaller window by zooming around as necessary to show the important detail. Adobe’s implementation doesn’t really facilitate either operation.
Specifically, Captivate’s new tool provides two boxes—one to identify the zoomed region (the “zoom area”), the other to display it (the “zoom destination”). This works well if the region you wish to highlight is very small, but is awkward for displaying a dialog box in full screen. Though you can copy and paste the zoom effect from slide to slide for uniformity, the zoom transitions in each slide, derailing any attempt to use the effect in multiple slides. Though there are some workarounds, users seeking to migrate over from Camtasia in particular will find this implementation frustrating.
Also new is the ability to insert a highlight box that can gray out the rest of the screen, a nice attention-focusing result that worked well in our tests. As before, Captivate makes it simple to import PowerPoint slides into a presentation which is a great alternative to building that functionality into the program itself.
Workflows
Captivate offers multiple workflows for creating narrations, and one of them should work for you. As mentioned above, you can narrate while capturing the screencam, which works well for short, quick-and-dirty-type presentations. Alternatively, you can capture audio slide by slide, which Captivate enhances with a script area in the recording window. In both cases, you can perform simple cut-and-paste operations to the audio from within Captivate, as well as allocate the audio to multiple slides in the presentation.
I found the easiest workflow was to record and perfect the narration in a separate program, import it into Captivate, and use the Edit Audio Timing dialog to allocate timing between the slides. Note that the slide preview in that tool is really tiny, so you may want to jot down slide timing beforehand (e.g., “note to self; at 47 seconds, switch to slide 8”) to facilitate synchronization.
In addition to inserting narrations within each slide, you can also insert background music into the project. Captivate includes a helpful control to reduce the volume of the background music when a slide contains other audio, simplifying the mixing of the two tracks.
Delivering Your Project
Once you’ve perfected your slides and audio synchronization, it’s time to produce your file. Here, screencam producers will encounter a couple of frustrations. First, Adobe takes a Model T approach to streaming production, as in “you can encode in any format you want as long as it’s Flash.” Second, though Captivate has an excellent bandwidth tool that shows you the size and bits per second of each slide in the project, you can’t dial in the desired data rate. Instead your only options are to reduce the frame rate or increase JPEG compression to meet the data rate, which will require some time-consuming trial and error.
In addition to streaming output, you can also render a standalone executable, publish the project to Adobe Connect Enterprise, or upload the finished project via FTP. One extraordinarily helpful option is the ability to output the slides to a Word document, complete with graphics, captions, slide notes, and blank lines for learner notes. You can pick and choose the slides to include and produce them in table format, with up to nine slides per page.
Once in Word, you can customize as necessary. You can view the document I produced from Captivate here. What you see is direct from Captivate without any additional editing on my part. Add a couple of numbered instructions per slide, and you have a document that significantly enhances your online presentation.
Quizzes and Simulations
Captivate’s second function is to create online quizzes and simulations, and here the experience is nearly overwhelmingly positive, though there are pockets of room for improvement. Let’s start with the basics, and then discuss the grumbles.
In this version, Adobe added a helpful quiz and simulation wizard to get you started. As before, you can add still images, audio, or video to your slides to make the simulation more realistic. Adobe also added a new view to visually display the program’s branching capabilities, with legends for success and failure branches and other results.
Also new is an Advanced Interaction view that provides a more data-oriented view of the interactions. Between the two new screens, and Captivate’s already rich, multimedia development environment, Captivate can now go far beyond simple multiple-choice quizzes into complex simulations for training sales, human resources, and other personnel.
My grumble? I’d like to have an easier way to make the questions look uniform. For example, once you deviate from a template, like moving a button or answer to a different location, it can be time-consuming to make the same changes to other slides. My initial thought was to perfect the look and feel of one question, then duplicate that and use it as a template for other questions. However, you can’t duplicate questions in Captivate.
I went back and forth with Adobe on the easiest way to duplicate a custom look and feel, and got little help. If you view the quiz I created at www.doceo.com/quiz.htm, you’ll see that the buttons and text are located in different locations on each slide, which would drive me crazy if this was a real project.
Then I discovered Captivate’s Grid and Snap to Grid functions, and realized I could clean it all up in about 20 minutes. Perhaps not so easy to fix is another problem I had, where the title looked fine in the project but didn’t show up in the rendered quiz. Basically, it seemed that the more you strayed from Captivate’s pre-built templates, the greater the potential for incurring minor, but irritating, issues like these.
I also experienced one strange operational anomaly in Question 6 of my quiz: answer B doesn’t appear. I duplicated the question using Adobe’s fixed template as Question 7, which worked fine, so the problem doesn’t appear to be endemic. When I created the quiz on another computer, the problem went away entirely. For all future quizzes, I’ll simply use Adobe’s template unmodified and hopefully avoid formatting and other issues entirely.
What’s the net/net? Captivate offers extraordinary functionality with some potholes you will need to identify and learn to avoid. The new branching simulation tools take the product far beyond its screen capture and simple quiz roots, to where it can provide a unique value in the enterprise.