Captivate Versus Camtasia Studio
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.
Which version of Captivate are you using?
The latest version, 5.
Yes, in my opinion Camtasia also took a huge leap forward with version 7.
I agree with Peter.
Camtasia is much better for video creation and editing.
I’ve used both, but have found Captivate to be much better for videos that are created and then kept up-to-date for successive software releases. Being able to simply replace screenshots and tweak the mouse position if the screens change is priceless.
I wouldn’t use it for one-off promotional videos or anything that you’d use once and then discard, but for for creating and maintaining basic how-to videos, it’s great.
Different tools for different purposes.
How do you handle syncing the audio with the video when you can’t watch the video recording while listening to the audio? I could never quite figure that out. Since I do adjust the audio quite a bit after the initial recording, this seemed like a major obstacle to me.
I’m still using Captivate 3, but I haven’t found the audio syncing issue to be that tricky. Now, I should explain I work primarily on eLearning and use Captivate to add user interaction to the demos (I don’t create any straight screencast videos). I’ve found a good way to work with the audio is to add audio to the individual interactions instead of the slide.
Sounds like I need to take a look at the new version of Camtasia.