Macromedia Captivate Review

by Jeff Wong

Introduction

Macromedia's Captivate is an evolution from their previous demonstration creator, RoboDemo 5. According to Captivate's Product Manager, Silke Fleischer, they renamed RoboDemo to Captivate “to more appropriately convey its ability to create both attention-grabbing content and engaging interactive elements.” In other words, they wanted to deemphasize demonstration creation abilities and instead focus on its presentation and simulation capabilities.

Although many reviewers gave RoboDemo 5 very high marks, it disappointed me in several ways. Its biggest problem was that with automatic capturing turned on, it would still not automatically capture all of my actions. This was especially noticeable when performing quick actions in rapid succession; when using the mouse wheel; when the computer stuttered; or during some transitional slides where the computer loads a sidebar or pop-up window.

A lost slide often takes much more time to repair than it takes to record the entire demonstration. Imagine trying to demonstrate a long process only to find out that one of the slides in the middle of the process is missing. You can insert a slide but you still have to capture that slide, make all the transitions work well together, and repair the demonstration. Common remedies would be to manually capture slides (which are not automatically annotated) but you should not have to manually capture slides when you enable automatic capturing.

RoboDemo 5 also made it laborious to preview your work. Although there was a preview button, this button either previewed just the current slide or the entire demonstration. Previewing the current slide is inadequate for testing branching or other interactive elements. Previewing your entire demonstration wastes time because even on a fast test machine, it took about 1.5 to 2 seconds to compile each slide. In a demonstration size of thirty slides, a lot of time is wasted on compilation.

Did Macromedia improve RoboDemo enough to justify the name change? Can it hold its own as a presentation and simulation tool? In many ways Macromedia took all the right steps but Captivate still lacks in a few key areas.

First Impressions

In RoboDemo 5, Macromedia packaged a lightweight installation guide with the CD. This guide covered only installation, providing little value past my first ten minutes with the product. With Captivate, they upgraded the installation guide into a “Getting Started” guide. This guide includes written instructions on how to use several of Captivate's new features. They made a good decision by including this guide – instead of cutting costs; the few extra pages provide much utility.

In RoboDemo 5, on first load the application loads an introductory tutorial built using the RoboDemo. This tutorial gets you started quickly and shows you the power of the application. On first load, Captivate does not automatically load an introductory tutorial. Instead it displays a menu with links to several introductory tutorials. Although having several smaller specialized tutorials is better organizationally, a general introduction video would help me get excited about Captivate. Macromedia's Captivate site hosts a good example of this at - http://www.macromedia.com/software/captivate/productinfo/features/brz_tour/

I watched all six of Captivate's tutorials and they were generally very good. I was surprised that they chose not to add audio narration to their tutorials given that these tutorials are locally hosted, not web-based. File size should not be a concern. Additionally in their “Audio” tutorial, their last slide has a tip on how to reduce file size for slower connections. Unfortunately the last line of this tip is cutoff, so you are not told how to reduce the file size. Since Macromedia made these tutorials using Captivate, this made me wonder whether it was human error or application error. Of anyone Macromedia should know their own application perfectly; this small error casts some doubt.

Demonstrations

I created several demonstrations and an interactive simulation of how to use Microsoft Word's “Styles and Formatting” sidebar to apply paragraph styles and of how to use the “Modify Style” dialog to modify styles.

Unedited automatically captured demonstration

Edited demonstration without audio narration

Edited demonstration with audio narration

Interactive simulation

Recording

Recording in Captivate is easy. To start recording a demo, you first either choose the area of the screen to capture, or set a currently open window as the application to capture.

When you start recording, Captivate captures all of your mouse-clicks and mouse-drags and signals their capture with a camera shutter sound. If you want to do a manual capture, press the “Print Screen” key. To finish recording, press the “End” key.

It is a minimalist recording interface that gets the job done. Although the audio cues help, the quality of the camera shutter sound is horrible. It is more appropriate than say scratching a chalk board or a cat screeching, but nearly as bad.

As I mentioned earlier, the ineffectiveness of the auto-recording feature was one of my biggest qualms with RoboDemo 5. Unfortunately, it remains so in Captivate.

After viewing my unedited recording, you will notice that it repeats itself several times, particularly when clicking on the “Format” dropdown and when using the “Styles and Formatting” sidebar. I later created a similar demonstration using a higher spec computer. The stuttering was caused by running an almost minimum spec computer.

Auto-recording still cannot capture transitional slides, like loading sidebars or popup windows. Captivate's online help admits that auto-recording cannot capture these slides and requests that you manually capture them. However, it is easy to forget this step. For example, when you click a button that opens a pop-up window, you hear the audio cue. This audio cue seems to indicate that Captivate captured the pop-up window. Unfortunately, Captivate only captures the original screen but not the pop-up window. Audio cues do not reliably indicate which slides are captured during transitions. The only way Macromedia can fix this problem is if they reliably capture transitional slides.

Editing

Captivate's hallmark new feature, its timeline, is a huge improvement to the editing interface and by itself makes Captivate an essential upgrade from RoboDemo 5. When I first heard about the timeline, I was thinking along the lines of Macromedia's Flash and Director timelines where the timeline is central to the entire production. If Captivate followed the same path, I assumed that although this gives the user absolute control over the demonstration, it would be at a severe cost to the simplicity of Captivate, one of Captivate's strongest points. To my surprise and delight, I was dead wrong.

Instead of adding an overarching timeline similar to Flash and Director, each slide has its own timeline. Since each slide has its own timeline, they are manageable and easy to visualize. Using a drag-and-drop interface, the intuitive timeline makes editing very easy. Best of all, the timeline addition is transparent. You can minimize the timeline and treat your slides similarly to RoboDemo 5.

Although the timeline eases allocating and visualizing how much time to give each slide element, it lacks in one major area: the inability to display elements mid-animation. The broken preview feature exacerbates this problem. Captivate previews single slides within the editing interface. Unfortunately, it does not work with text animations (unless you have a very high spec computer) and interactive elements. These are the two things that you need to test the most. The only way to test animations and interactive elements without previewing the entire demonstration is to preview the next five slides. This means compiling four unnecessary slides. To properly time an animation, it might take around five trials resulting in wasted time compiling and switching interfaces (from preview to edit). Although the in-editor preview needs work, the preview next five slides feature is a life saver. It saves you from having to recompile the entire demonstration to test singular elements.

The editing interface itself remains as solid as it was in RoboDemo 5. It is almost self-explanatory in its design. Every common element from captions, to rollovers, to animations is immediately accessible. You can easily make all of your elements consistently spaced, sized, and aligned on the same slide. Additionally, you can apply caption style modifications across slides. Unfortunately, you cannot resize captions across slides or set their border sizes. Macromedia included many element styles, all of them well done. In addition to using their prepackaged styles, you can also import your own graphics.

Although you can certainly make professional demonstrations with their built-in styles, I question their choice of either built-in styles or imported graphics. Captivate forces users to be fluent in Fireworks or Illustrator to create customized styles. A simple style maker could make their most complex styles: two-tone, three-point gradients. With an option to change the roundness of the buttons, this style maker would allow users to quickly generate customized graphics.

Publishing

Captivate includes several useful publishing options. In addition to the standard SWF format publishing, it includes options to publish to a Breeze server, create standalone EXE files, make email or handout versions, and support file transfer via FTP. You can also enable 508 compliance, alter compression preferences, and change the playback bar to a large number of built-in playback templates. The wide array of publishing options should be enough to satisfy most users. The addition of 508 compliance is a much needed upgrade for users of RoboDemo 5.

Captivate includes a bandwidth analysis tool, which analyses the demonstration down to the per-slide level and also segregates audio. This tool helps analyze tradeoffs when trying to reduce file size. If you are debating on whether to use stronger graphical compression, this tool might help you determine that excessive audio, not large graphics increased file size. Since audio is usually the biggest space hog, Captivate separately analyzes audio. This is a stunningly useful analysis tool that helps when optimizing demonstrations.

Audio

Macromedia also improved their audio support by adding a built-in audio recorder and editor. Again they wisely chose a minimalist design for their audio editor, making it no more complex than the Sound Recorder application included with Microsoft Windows. Another great feature is that the audio recorder automatically converts recorded audio to MP3 and can import MP3 or WAV formats.

Before using the audio editor, you are asked to calibrate your microphone. To my disappointment, the audio calibration utility only checks for meeting the minimal recording level. It does not equalize or adjust recorded audio. The microphone I use is very soft unless I enable “Microphone Boost” in the Windows. I calibrated using both boosted and unboosted settings and the audio was not adjusted to the same volume. Equalizing the volume should be one of the main purposes for calibrating the microphone. Hopefully Macromedia will fix this problem so the audio will be just as consistent as demonstrations.

To guide your audio narration, you can view automatically created slide captions or view your own slide notes. Although this is a useful feature, it is not universally available. For example, rollovers do not have slide captions or notes. Without these, it took much longer to make the rollover narrations than the slide narrations.

Also when adding audio to interactive elements, like rollovers, the audio streams overlap. Although this works well for short audio signals, for narrations it is a headache. I admit that the sheer quantity of audio narration in my narrated demonstration is overkill. However, I can imagine other Captivate users running into this problem when creating a narrated, interactive demonstration. Macromedia should include an option to make audio streams non-interruptible.

Interactivity

Macromedia is very proud of Captivate's ability to add interactivity without requiring any programming skill. Although I have programming skill, I admit to not using any of it when creating the rollovers in the demonstrations, or when creating the simulation. You can easily create rollovers and buttons by using their dialogs.

There are a few shortcomings with interactive elements. The most glaring was the inability to put interactive elements in the bottom ten percent of the demonstration area. At first I thought the playback bar was in the way. As it turns out, when I moved the playback bar, the rollovers located in that region still did not function. The editor gives no indication of this being dead space. I assume that Macromedia will fix this bug.

In order to simplify the creation of click boxes, Captivate automatically includes success and failure captions, that can be disabled. One of the things I wanted to do was to combine some of the included animated effects with a click box failure. For example, instead of displaying a caption on a misclick, I wanted to display an animated arrow. Unfortunately, during failures, you can only have either a failure caption or nothing at all. This was likely a design decision to keep the application simple.

When using my simulation, you will notice slides where you must left-click “Heading 1” twice rather than a left-click followed by a right-click. When creating software simulations using any Shockwave-based medium, you cannot model right-clicking or double-clicking. I cannot blame Captivate for this, but this is a drawback to consider when making software simulations. Although you cannot model several major mouse functions, most of the keyboard is easily modeled.

Effects

Captivate includes seven sets of arrow animations and six highlighting animations. They are all well done, but when compared to the sheer quantity of included text animations (well over twenty), the quantity of arrow and highlighting animations seems paltry. That said; it is as easy to add animation effects as it is to add any other elements.

Conclusion

Macromedia took all the right steps in all the right directions with Captivate. That said, taking steps in all the right directions does not guarantee complete success. In this case, Captivate falls short because of a few bugs, broken features, and inconsistency.

Is Captivate worth the upgrade? Yes, it is a superior product to RoboDemo 5. The learning curve is so gradual that with your first demonstration you will start to recoup the cost of the software ($500) in increased productivity. Is it the perfect demonstration/simulation creator? No, but it is well on its way.

Vitals

Developer: Macromedia
Cost: $500
Available: Now

Requirements

Test System Specs

Screenshots

Storyboard view

Editing view

Timeline editor

Audio editor

Click box wizard

Flash export

Publishing dialog

Size comparison