I’ve always favoured manual recording over automatic recording when capturing software-based tasks in Adobe Captivate. It gives me more control and allows me to be selective about which screens I capture.
When I upgraded to Captivate 5.0, I found that I had to change the way in which I do my manual recordings. This is because Captivate 5.0 captures the mouse position during manual recording rather differently than previous versions: when you press the screen is capured, and the current position of the mouse pointer is used as the destination for the movement of the mouse on that slide. In Captivate 4.0 and earlier, the position of the mouse when you pressed was used as the origin for the movement of the mouse on that slide.
As a result, if I carry out a manual recording in Captivate 5.0 in the same way as I was accustomed to doing in Captivate 4.0 (by pressing immediately following each mouse click), the resulting movie shows mouse-over effects on menu items or other controls showing up too early, when the mouse begins to move towards the control.
The workaround is to do manual recordings slightly differently in Captivate 5.0: I now press immediately before each mouse click — and to avoid mouse-over effects showing up prematurely, I position the mouse slightly away from the control (just enough so that the mouse-over effect does not show) as I press . This requires me to adjust the position of the mouse on the resulting Captivate slides, and means that I have a little more work to do than when I did manual recording with Captivate 4.0 and earlier.
Another solution that I’m currently using is to do my manual recordings in Captivate 4.0, and then to open the resulting projects in Captivate 5.0 so that I can take advantage of some of the useful new features that the latest version offers.
-Matthew Ellison
