I've been teaching and developing with Adobe Captivate for years. The program has always been able to record Full Motion Recordings (FMRs). Never heard of an FMR? You are not alone. Usually developers learn about them by accident. If you record your screen using Captivate's Automatic mode, every click of your mouse will result in a single screen capture. Those screen captures convert to single slides in a Captivate project once you end the recording session.
During the recording process, if you perform a mouse drag (click the mouse clicker and then move the mouse around the screen), Captivate won't capture a single screen. Instead, Captivate will capture the entire drag event as a video--it'll be as if you've pointed a video camera at the screen and turned it on. When you finish with the recording, you'll see a single slide in Captivate representing the captured event.
Since FMRs aren't as easy to edit or control as single slides, I usually tell new Captivate developers to shy away from dragging the mouse during the recording process. Instead, I encourage everyone to click on screen items to ensure they get single screen captures.
In retrospect, I may have been overly hard on FMRs--they do have a role. FMRs can be useful if you want to demonstrate complex mouse events smoothly. For instance, if you're trying to show someone how to use a specific filter in Photoshop, capturing the process with an FMR might be more effective than simple screen captures.
To create an FMR during the recording process, simply select Full Motion from the Recording Type area and record your lesson.
Once you end the recording, the captured video will appear on the Filmstrip as a single slide. You'll be able to differentiate FMR slides from regular slides easily enough... FMR thumbnails on the Filmstrip have a little camera icon in the lower right.
Next week I'll show you how to edit the FMR. In the meantime, check out the FMR I created late last year (it shows thedifferences between Captivate 5 and 5.5).
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I think there are more efficient FMR's, like TechSmith's Cantasia. Camtasia Studio, for instance - has better FMR editing capabilities. I've used Captivate in this mode, definitely not a product strength.
Posted by: JRA | January 13, 2012 at 11:32 PM