Jul 2, 2012

Types of Recording in Captivate

There are three types of recording available in Captivate: Automatic, Full Motion and Manual. In this article, we will review these three in detail.

Automatic Recording: It is perhaps the most commonly used type of recording in Captivate. When you record using Automatic option, screen captures are done automatically by Captivate and each screen capture comes as a new slide in the project. The default time duration for each slide can be set in Edit - Preferences - Defaults.
However, if the Actions in Real Time option has been enabled, this default time duration will be ignored.
Captions, Click Boxes, etc are also generated automatically depending upon the recording mode you have selected. Refer this article to know more about recording modes in Captivate.

Full Motion Recording: When you record in Full Motion, the actions are recorded in real time, i.e. if you take 6 seconds for a drag & drop action, the slide with this action will also be for 6 seconds. It can be used to record complex things like drawing images in paint or photoshop, etc. But a major disadvantage is that the file size becomes bigger when you use Full Motion Recording. Sometimes, when you are using Automatic or Manual Recording also, you might get some slides in Full Motion Recording. This happens when you do drag & drop or mouse wheel based actions. It depends on the settings you have mentioned under Edit - Preferences - Recording - Settings. Those slides which used a Full Motion Recording will be indicated by a handicam icon in the project.

Manual Recording: Manual Recording will let you choose the screen which should be recorded. The first screen after you start the recording will be captured. After that, you have to use the shortcut (usually the PrintScrn key) to capture a new screen. This shortcut is set in Edit - Preferences - Recording - Keys. This type of recording is not good to explain processes with a lot of steps. But if there are a lot of processes in between your recording, that you may want to remove from the end output, this is a nice way to avoid rework. (If you choose Automatic Recording you have to manually remove all the unwanted slides later. It is better not to record them at the first place.)