Long video sessions on two monitors

Question

I am having three issues capturing long training sessions and teleconferences. They run 5-8 hours in length and have no natural breaking point. I have tried to capture them in one session and, without fail, the program crashes before it can even complete finalizing. It always terminates with a message about bad data or insufficient disk space (it’s being save to a blank 4Tb drive). So, apparently, saving the whole conference won’t work. So, I decided I would run two instances of Adobe Captivate. I would run one for one hour, then start the second. Once the second started, I’d terminate the first, it would finalize, then I’d save it, close it, and restart a third instance. I would continue this cycle until the conference ended and finish with a pile of slightly overlapping, slightly longer than one hour sessions and then edit and splice them together post production.
Doing this give me the three problems. First, I am working on a two monitor system. Once a screen capture is started, it appears Adobe takes control of the monitors. The capture monitor becomes primary and everything, and I mean everything, pops up in the middle of the capture screen first which destroys the integrity of the recording. How do I turn off that feature so I can work on the other monitor and have nothing interrupt the recording? Second problem, as soon as you stop a Captivate session, it finalizes the recording. Once the finalization completes, two things happen: 1) it immediately starts auto playback, including audio, in full screen mode, and 2) the started instance after hitting escape (Windows machine) to stop, defaults to an instance of Captivate which is now covering the recording screen even though the instance was started in the non-recording screen. This gives me the pleasure of not only polluting the screen with pop-ups in the middle of the recording, but now adds unwanted audio to the capture as everything coming over the sound card is captured. So, how do I reprogram this behavior to go away so it just finalizes and saves, silently and quietly until I am done for the day and can end my day and begin post production work?
So, I guess that’s four questions: 1) How can I record 8 hours at once, 2) how can I make the recording monitor not be the primary screen for the computer, 3) how can I get Captivate to not Auto play after finalizing and 4) how do I get the instance and recording controls to stay on the working monitor and not the recording monitor during before, during, and after a recording starts?
This happens in “Application capture”, “Window Capture” and “Region Capture” and it doesn’t matter which monitor I use for recording and which for working. They are not playing well together. I’ve even tried to make the computer sterile so it does nothing else but this and do all my work on another machine, but Captivate itself interferes with it working because of its behavior in finalizing. Right now the only way to overcome the behavior that I can see is to capture the whole session in one long video and leave the machine untouched during the recording, but the machine can’t take those long videos. Anyone got any help they can provide?
---Mike

Answer 1

Hi there
WRT "Funny, that's not what the literature says", can you please provide us with a pointer to exactly what you are referring to?
Personally, I think what you are hitting is some sort of "file size" limitation. Heck, even when you look at commercial DVD structure, you will notice that there are several VOB files. I think the split generally occurs at 2GB. So there is probably some limitation there.
FWIW, Captivate isn't alone with this capture issue. I use TechSmith Camtasia Studio as well as Captivate and I also participate in their forums. I notice similar reports for Camtasia WRT the problems trying to record those very lengthy sessions. And for the finalizing bit, Captivate and Camtasia Studio are similar creatures. In fact, you would be hard pressed to look at the finalizing part before you edit to know exactly which application you were actually using!
Cheers...Rick