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Captivate Versus Camtasia Studio

by Tom Johnson on Jul 18, 2010
categories: technical-writing video

I've been exploring Captivate lately because I wanted to translate some screencasts for a project I'm undertaking. It turns out, Captivate doesn't work so well for screencasting. Slide-based eLearning, sure. But when you have a lengthy software simulation, it fails because you can't edit the audio while watching the video play.

Really? Yes. Really. You know, like if you wanted to ensure the timing of the video is correct as you're listening to the audio, or if you make an adjustment to your video or audio timeline that affects your other actions -- good luck trying to resync the audio with the video.

When you edit the audio, it opens in another window, or even in Soundbooth if you have the Adobe eLearning suite. But the video recording doesn't play, so you can't tell if the small addition or deletion you make on the audio timeline is throwing everything else out of sync with the video recording.

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

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