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cmarsh
Participant
October 27, 2006
Question

Captive 2.0 vs Camtasia

  • October 27, 2006
  • 1 reply
  • 456 views
Hello,

I hope to open up a positive debate here so that my company makes the best long term decission. I own both Captivate 1.x and Camtasia 3.0. Both products have new version upgrades right now and money doesn't matter in this case as to which one I should purchase. My experience with Captivate 1.x was terrible! It frequently ate my projects with almost no method to recover my work. And, I had a lot of recording problems with Captivate so we never relased a single project from Captivate.

Camtasia was almost flawless - it worked with any machine we installed it on and gave us few problems once we learned it some of its configuration needs. So, you must ask why am I considering Captivate - simple, I think the product quality looked more professional than that of Camtasia. And now that Captivate has a pull-down menuing system it looks even more attractive to me.

So, who has worked with both and can provide me with some reasons to purchase the upgrade from Captivate? And, has Adobe now solved the corruption problem as well as provided some hardware suggestions? I know noboday can say if it works on Vista for sure yet but does Adobe have any information regarding the compatability of Captivate and Vista?

Thank you!
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    1 reply

    Captiv8r
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    October 27, 2006
    Hi cmarsh@synergy-intl.com

    Unfortunately, without knowing more about your situation, it's hard to say whether Captivate 2.0 is going to be much of an improvement.

    For example:

    Are you attempting to create movies consisting of hundreds of slides? If so, Captivate doesn't work well that way. I believe this applies to both versions 1 and 2. It simply doesn't *DO* really huge movies well.

    Where do you try to store your project file? I'm referring to the .CP file. Many folks see the .CP files corrupt all the time when they try to store them on the company network, then open Captivate and attempt to edit them there.

    I do believe there was a fundamental change with respect to stability of the .CP file. But until we see this thing "in the wild" for a while, we really don't know for sure if it's more stable and corrupts less easily. Personally, I've only had a corruption happen to me once in all the time I've used Captivate. And that particular project had been through the ringer, so to speak. I had moved it back and forth between me and another author and many many edits had occurred.

    Good luck with finding Captivate and Vista compatibility information. I'm not sure it exists quite yet. But I'm confident Adobe has its eye on the situation and will make information available once they can.

    Cheers... Rick
    C
    cmarshAuthor
    Participant
    October 27, 2006
    Hi Rick,

    Thank you so much for the prompt reply. Is there a good working limit with Captivate if hundreds of slides fails. I am guessing that one creates lots of little presentations and then links them together somehow. Camtasia is frequently used for recording training sessions in the development community, these sessions are sometimes and hour or more in length. Again, I am guessing that you would say Captivate is not a good choice here. However, in reality, for marketing I think people like small snippets of information so they can bounce around.

    Again, thank you and your single comment about file size might just be the difference between the two products that decides my direction.

    Chris
    A
    Anonymous
    October 27, 2006
    I have used both quite a bit and could not live without either of them. Like you, I wanted to just buy one...but, for my needs, I found that I really needed both of them. Here is my quick list of the pros/cons:

    Camtasia (v3)

    Pros: 1) ability to produce in several different file formats (.mov, .rm, .swf, .wmv, animated gif etc)
    2) Does a decent job with longer videos (>10 min)

    Cons: 1) Adding interactivity is possible, but this has to be done manually by creating Flash hot spots
    2) Adding quizzes is possible but somewhat cumbersome

    Captivate (v1)

    Pros: 1) Interactive videos are a breeze to make
    2) Adding callouts and highlights seems to be easier than Camtasia
    3) I personally like the flash tweening motion that it creates
    4) ability to export to Flash for more advanced editting

    Cons: 1) Only produce video files as swfs
    2) Large movies don't seem to work very well


    If I thought longer I could list some more. I have just recently downloaded the new versions of both. One feature that looks very promising in Captivate is the new Branching tab. Although one has always been able to do branching, it could be a little difficult to see everything, especially with more intricate branching.

    My $1/50 worth.

    SM
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