Missing the Action

Question

Hi all,
I am new to Captivate. I have a client that loved a short
demo i did for them on their employee website. It was about 5
minutes and it was flawless. Now, when i had the vice-pres of Human
Resources do the full presentation, Captivate missed an enormous
amount of activity on the screen. He was not blazing around, just
mousing and clicking, and entering text in a normal fashion. Entire
chuncks, i.e. logging in, were missing. I went with "custom size"
recording, sized IE to their web pages and enabled "auto"
recording, etc. etc. Am i missing something here? I cannot ask my
client to sit down and do it again hoping that after the hour it's
there!
TIA,
-peter

Answer 1

Hi again Peter
I can imagine the frustration. I think once you fully
understand and come to terms with Captivate and its recording ways,
it will hopefully make more sense to you.
You said:
Yes, what i did was to download the demo of Captivate. I got a
guest logon to their employee website. I tried it for about 5
minutes, clicking around and filling in boxes. For five minutes it
worked perfectly.
By "worked perfectly", are you saying it seemed to be
recording? Or are you instead saying you recorded five minutes
worth of action, played it back and it seemed to do fine? Assuming
it's the latter, I'm simply guessing here that what you watched in
playback mode seemed acceptable and you had no actual understanding
of the source at that point? What I mean by that is that you hadn't
quite grasped the whole individual screen shot thing and what you
observed led you to conclude it was all full motion.
You then said:
I bought the program and took it to the clients site, installed
it on their computer and there is where i learned about the uphill
battle i had on my hands. Right now, i am trying to recreate his
movements around the website, using his narration as a guide. I
just don't understand why it worked for me using the demo and then
the first slide recorded when the money was on the line was
recorded at 51 seconds instead of the 3 seconds that was set in the
preferences???
Unfortunately, without actually seeing what you were doing it
is rather difficult to ascertain what may be happening. I suppose
it's entirely possible that you managed to start recording in Full
Motion mode with Captivate. Hmmm, as you say you have Camtasia,
this actually makes some sense. When you began recording, did you
press F9? And F10 to stop? If so, those are typically the
keystrokes that force Captivate to begin recording full motion
clips.
When you click Options > Recording Options... what do you
see at the bottom of the Recording Options tab? Is there a check
mark inside the check box labeled: Record actions in real time? If
so, this might explain why a single slide might be timed
substantially longer than others. And as for that "default' slide
time, I believe that only applies to slides you manually create.
For example, by clicking Insert > Blank slide...
Sorry. Sometimes it seems I end up causing more questions to
be raised than actually answering the questions that were posed.
But with a little patience and perseverance, I think we'll get
through it.
Cheers... Rick