I've written a few articles about Captivate's video mode including how to trim videos, use the Pan and Zoom feature, how to edit the mouse points, and how to publish video demos.
I received an email from a fellow Captivate developer who really liked creating eLearning using Video Demo mode but was lamenting the slow speed of the mouse.
"I was previewing the project. You could hear my voiceover audio and could see the mouse moving from point A to B," she said, "But the mouse was moving really, really slowly. The speed was fine a few days earlier but now it's so slow it's distracting."
The developer was sure she'd done something to the video to mess up the mouse tracking speed but was stymied to explain the exact cause of the trouble.
I asked her if she had trimmed the video.
"Why yes," she replied. "I watched your video on YouTube to learn how."
And with that, I had the reason for her troubles and the solution.
For whatever reason, when you trim a Captivate video, the mouse speed shown in the video after the trim point often reduces to a crawl. While I don't know why this happens, I do have a solution.
Choose Edit > Edit Mouse Points. On the Timeline, select the first mouse point after the trimmed section of the video.
On the Properties panel, deselect Smoothen Mouse Path (Smoothen? Anyone think the option should be named Smooth instead of Smoothen?).
If you preview the video, you'll see that the mouse speed returns to its pre-trimmed speed. While you may need to repeat this process every time you trim a Captivate video, at least it's fast and painless.
It you'd like to see a slow mouse in action and how deselecting Smoothen Mouse Path fixes things, check out the video I created on IconLogic's YouTube channel.
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