Camtasia user moving to Captivate 9 - I want the entire slide to transition upon entry and exit

I agree with Rick and Lieve. I have both in my toolbox as well. Like any tool in a toolbox, they have their best usages depending on the job. I find Camtasia very easy to use and for any thing I want to do that doesn't require interaction, that's what I use.

As strange as it sounds, when I do basic Captivate tutorials, I use Camtasia. It's just made for things like that and I can get things done quickly.

As mentioned earlier, I do not really consider Camtasia and Captvate as direct competitors...they are quite a bit different apps IMHO.

I want to add some comments to Rick's answer. It looks indeed like you presume that Captivate slides are just movie clips which is not the case at all. You didn't specify if you will be using Camtasia along with Captivate or replace Camtasia by Captivate? They are indeed totally different, have both in my toolbox. Camtasia is meant to create pure movies, that will be watched in a passive way. You can add callouts etc, but you never end up with an interactive eLearning course. Beware: Camtasia is the best application to create a pure software demonstration on the market IMO. You can do about the same with the Video Demo feature of Captivate but it doesn't have the same features at all.

Transitions like the one you talk about are typical transitions between movie clips, and you can have those in the cpvc-editor, the dedicated editor for cpvc movies created with the Video Demo feature. You can add cpvc-slides, slides with such a video, to a cptx-project but a cptx-project is much more than a video.

Captivate is not a presentation tool neither, although I use it mostly for Captivate presentations. It is perfectly possible to create an eLearning tutorial where the user is not even aware of the fact that the tutorial consists of slides: the playhead can move from the first slide to the second without any action of the user, without a playbar, without buttons. Why should you then need a transition like the fade in from black, or a cross-fade? You can have interactions on a slide, and Captivate will allow you to have transitions or even better, all kind of effects for objects on that slide based on the interaction with the user. Could you explain what you want to do with Captivate, maybe a more appropriate answer could be posted here.

Since those are totally different applications, I don't think such a command list is even useful at all. You don't use a swiss knife the same ways as a complicated multipurpose electrical tool that can be used for some similar, but also other work flows as the swiss knife.  Are you talking about shortcut keys? Do you have system variables in Camtasia? Do you have individual timelines for objects in Camtasia and a timeline for each slide?