Captivate only captures the final screen in Software Demo. Captivate shuts down when I try to do a Video Demo.
I’ve recently moved over from a free screen capture software (OBS) to Captivate, as we have most of the other Adobe products but I am having serious issues with creating a Video Demo, and a Software Simulation project.
Video Demo: This crashes the application. End of. I get a message telling me that Captivate has had to close, do I want to send a report to Adobe? I’ve done that a couple of times.
Software Simulation: I had the Captivate trial version for a month and was able to create Software Demonstrations and it seemed to do what it said on the tin. My company decided to bite the bullet and pay for the monthly subscription. The version of Captivate I have is 2019, 11.8.1.219.
I then had a brief break, didn’t touch Captivate for over a month and now, it does not work. I’ll lay out my process in the hope that it may answer some questions.
- Open Captivate
- Click New
- Click Software Simulation
- Click Create
On the next form
- Screen Size: Full Screen / Monitor 2 (I’ve noticed that whichever screen Captivate is on, it becomes screen 1 and the other one is screen 2. I once recorded Captivate rather than the software that I was trying to demo).
- Automatic Option
- Demo
- (I did try the other project types but the result was the same)
- No Panning
- Audio(My microphone)
- System Audio (Checked or unchecked.)
- Click Record.
I get the countdown timer, when it disappears, I go through the screen capture process on my software. At the end of the process, I press the END key and hear the camera shutter for the first time. Captivate then loads and produces only the final screenshot/slide of the software.
All settings within the Settings form are default.
What am I missing?
I couldn’t figure out if you are on Windows or on Mac. I am a Windows user and am aware that capturing, whether a Software simulation or a Video Demo needs to launch Captivate as an administrator. If you are on Mac, ignore this tip.
Personally I don’t use sims in Demo mode since Video Demo appeared for a couple of reasons:
- Quality of the Video Demo is much better.
- You have a dedicated editor with a lot of possibilities and they are non-destructive.
- In Demo mode you don’t have interactivities, so the native output of Video Demo to MP4 is perfect.
- Software simulations mostly will have so-called Full Motion Recording (FMR) slides, which are originally based on SWF-technology. They are converted to MP4 on publishing but that is not always working perfectly. If I expect a FMR slide (in the other modes which I still use) I always pause the process and insert a Video Demo slide to replace the FMR slide.
Back to your problems. If you are on a screen with a resolution which doesn’t allow 100% display resolution (necessary for the capture) how did you cope with that? Did you edit DPIawareness (as appears in the warning dialog) or did you decrease the resolution?
You should hear a camera click for each captured background image. The fact that it is not the case proves there is a real problem. You can always force a manual screenshot (default key is PrintScreen) but that would be a tedious process.
Your issues with Video Demo: did you try a capture with or without using your camera? I never use the camera for recording and have heard that some cameras don’t like Captivate (or vice versa).
I have published several articles about capturing, but since you focus on Software simulations, maybe this link could help a little bit:
Software simulations (1): Preparation – eLearning (adobe.com)
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