Adobe Captivate 2.0

List Price: $1,090.73 Discount Price: $498.98

Features:

• Brand new Full Retail box

Customer Reviews:

Looking for a way to present training and demonstrations on the web? Adobe Captivate could be your dream solution. [Posted on 2007-03-25]
Adobe Captivate started life as Flashcam from Nexus Concepts 2000, then became RoboDemo when acquired by eHelp of San Diego. Macromedia then bought eHelp and renamed the application Captivate. Finally, Adobe acquired Macromedia. So, you could say this application's been around. That is a testament to the usefulness of the concept. Unfortunately, the execution leaves a little to be desired. But before you are completely turned off to this little diamond in the rough, read on to see if it's worth the shortcomings.

To be honest, I've never before used an application specifically aimed at training or demonstration on the web. I typically publish help files in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format as necessary. That doesn't always help when trying to train someone to use a content management system, or when developing custom solutions for less-than-computer-literate users. So, I went looking for a way to present a more visual experience. Enter Captivate!

First, the good stuff.

Captivate is incredibly easy to use. Just install it and you are ready to start recording presentations. Spend a few moments to learn the shortcut keys, and you can do pretty much everything you need to do for a simple follow-along style demo. When recording is done, you can edit slides, add audio and video, and modify cursor movement. All of this is pretty much as easy as using Power Point.

Recording screenshots is done in a couple of different ways; manually with a key press, or automatically when you click or drag the mouse. Dragging can also automatically record full motion clips. Configuration of these options is quite simple, and offered on a popup window when you start recording a new project. After trying both the automated and manual methods, I chose to capture screenshots by key press, with automatic recording while dragging. This gave me quite a bit of control and more flexibility in choosing what elements to capture, especially because I tend to jump around a lot while working. Rather than grabbing every action then having to remove the useless, incorrect, or unnecessary excursions, I can just take the images that best show the task at hand.

It is also possible to import slides from a PowerPoint presentation, which is good news for those trainers and presenters who have existing libraries of content they want to migrate to Captivate. Export options include standalone executable, zip or swf file, and there is the ability to integrate with Adobe Connect. This feature alone might be worth the price of admission.

Editing the slides is pretty simple for most tasks. For example, you can add highlight regions, move the cursor position and path, and control some effects as well as the amount of time a slide is on the screen. Add some static or animated text to draw attention to important points or areas, and you're golden. There are a number of built-in Flash animation effects for type as well as mouse clicks. You can build more of your own to enhance your presentation or share them with others. Of course, this requires Flash or something that will output the SWF format properly.

Training interactions are also quick to set up thanks to a great mapping view. This lets you see the paths and possible choices when using branching interactions. Captivate can also track responses for SCORM/AICC compliance, a real boon for trainers. Add this to Adobe Connect and you can distribute your training and courses across the world. Literally.

For web work, you will have to pay special attention to file size. Adding extra screenshots, or any audio and video, will significantly increase your file size, in many cases becoming almost unusable for web presentations. A simple demo can quickly get above a few MB, so it will be important to spend some time fine tuning your demo and removing anything that adds weight without having a good reason for being there.

Unfortunately, there are some down sides. The application doesn't feel mature due to lots of bugs. One of the most annoying manifestations is an 'unsticky' window or menu. When this happens, menu items fail to work properly since they disappear before a selection can be made. Typically, the only recourse is to relaunch the application. Sometimes, it saves you the effort of closing it by spontaneously crashing. Save often. Very often.

Another difficulty I have is the lack of flexibility in modifying slides within Captivate. While it is possible to include mouse movements and text entry animations, it is difficult to synthesize them. In fact, it's just not possible in some cases. I would love to see the ability to just place a cursor and path arbitrarily on a given slide, to create the path as a standard Bezier vector for editing, as well as text field examples. Going further, being able to split out menu items on the slides, like drop downs or highlights, would make the files smaller and thus easier to distribute. On the plus side, you can take advantage of round-trip capabilities with Adobe Photoshop, which helps cut down file size and give lots of room for tweaking and custom edits.

Suggested retail from Adobe's site is about $600. For a business or organization that needs to produce training and demo materials, this is a pretty reasonable price for the available features. While there are other solution out there for free, and some that actually cost more, Adobe has a good balance, and if history is any indicator, they will continue to craft this application into a truly indispensable tool for trainers.

The stability issues notwithstanding, Captivate is a very impressive tool. For a full list of features, check out the Adobe Captivate product page.

Overall, I am pretty happy with Captivate. The features are unlike any package I've used, and it's almost embarrassingly simple to create engaging simulations and training. I anxiously await a dot release to fix the problems. Download the demo and build yourself some presentations. And keep an eye out for fixes.

Flawless interaction with Flash [Posted on 2007-05-10]
I was very glad to see Captivate 2 come out. I am a Flash Designer and also do Instructional Design in the Seattle area. I have been using Captivate 1 and have had some frustration with importing Flash. But since I have been using Captivate 2, I can use Flash 8 (had to use MX before) and the import and playback is flawless, thank you Adobe my life got easier!

Export to Flash 8 (or MX 2004) will allow you to import directly into Flash and then allow you to customize the project even more. When you done, just publish it like any standard File.

Also importing Flash video is very simple to do if you haven't done it before, it just works great and with more customers wanting video on the web its perfect.

Those three features for me made Captivate 2 a worthwhile upgrade.

Another fun feature if you work with storyboards, Captivate gives you a storyboard view. You import your storyboards as slides then easily create a animatic with sound, work out your timing and publish the final project. Can be published all the usual ways including printing them all out in word.

Working with the new library is also a nice feature, working with Flash you just take that for granted. Another great new feature is the new toolbar below, that is another timesaver, no more searching through the file system.

The Lock and Hide makes life easier, the zoom is a feature, I was hoping this version would have it when came it and it does. And the graying out feature is something that I would have not given much thought about until I tried it, then you realize, "this make sense". It is a wonderful new way to bring the learners focus to a particular area.

Captivate 2 is well worth the upgrade, it works flawlessly with Flash and its new features allow you to work faster and keeps you in the creative flow. Great job Adobe!

Great system for etraining [Posted on 2007-06-26]
I've created several tutorials and the performance, functionality and features have been much improved over version 1. A lot of basics are now included like alignment and other font styles that were certainly missed when creating professional tutorials and rapid learning experiences before. The audio voiceovers provide an easy way to add scripted voice to the system. Downside are that I cannot get this to work with Windows Vista programs, I think another upgrade or patch is required.

I use it every day and give it about a 2.5 [Posted on 2007-09-17]
I'll begin by saying that, once you have a little practice, Captivate 2 will give you a very slick tutorial. I found I was able to get going quickly. It's fairly intuitive, which explains a fairly thin instruction manual. I use a Blue (brand) Snowball USB microphone that works great.

HOWEVER, for a piece of software that retails well over $1,000.00 (US), I'm appalled by the inconsistencies and bugs. In addition, I'm shocked that even though I reported a legitimate bug, they told me directly that they had no idea when it would be fixed - or if it would be fixed at all!!

I have come across scores of other little irritations that I haven't bothered to call in to them because of their poor reception. I routinely am unable to copy script text from one slide to another (instead I have to paste it into an outside text program like Noetpad, recopy it from there and then paste it into the other slide); my menus often refuse to stay open - I have to close and restart the program to clear that one up; and, if I delete a slide, the slide after the deleted one loses any script text which is replaced with the text from slide #1 of the show.

Adobe is known for expensive programs. But I thought they were also known for quality programs. Quite honestly I don't hate this program (I use it daily and get good results - now that I figured out all the workarounds), but I'm sure glad I didn't pay for it out of my own pocket.

Two words - Buy Camtasia! [Posted on 2007-10-16]
I picked Adobe Captivate over Camtasia because of their reputation. Boy was I wrong. For creating web demos, Captivate is nothing more than a gloried version of Powerpoint. It does not record dynamic content on a web page (like Flash, movies, or AJAX activity), and cannot keep up with multiple web page clicks. I get many blank slides and off kilter slides that take me hours to edit.

If you are looking for true webcasting software, but Camtasia.

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