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Adobe Captivate video demo - mouse out of sync

Community Beginner ,
May 14, 2019 May 14, 2019

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I use Adobe Captivate’s Video Demo feature as a screen capturing tool to create short instructional videos. I’ve used it a number of times in the past without any problems, however, I’m experiencing a problem now that I haven’t been able to solve:

When I play back the video I’ve just recorded, the mouse in the playback is not synched with the mouse’s actions on the screen. The physical mouse is delayed behind what it is doing. For example, if, for the video, I select a file in a folder, on the playback, the file will highlight before the mouse clicks on the file or has even reached the file. Strangely, the problem appears to specifically occur with regards to highlighting files or folders, because in the same video, there is a button click and some keyboard typing into an input field, but these appear to be synched in time.

Captivate does have some recording settings that I’ve played around with, but I’ve exhausted all its options and nothing has worked.

Captivate also has the options to edit the mouse points when editing the captured video. Through this feature, one can remove and create mouse points. This does help to improve things, but even when setting the mouse click to be on the exact frame, the playback is still out of sync.

I’ve also tried clearing Captivate’s cache, thinking the problem might occur because of lag time and memory issues.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to why this might be occurring?

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Community Expert ,
May 15, 2019 May 15, 2019

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Sorry,, watched the recording but couldn't detect the problem. Where is the out of synch happening? I do use Video Demo quite a lot, especially for creating interactive video tutorials. Never had a problem like you describe.

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Community Beginner ,
May 16, 2019 May 16, 2019

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At the 16 second mark, the video shows a list of 7 items being selected. The first item clicked is highlighted in time, but as the mouse moves down to the 7th item to be selected, note how the 7 items are highlighted just before the mouse gets there. Subsequently, 3 other items are highlighted before the mouse actually reaches them.

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Community Expert ,
May 22, 2019 May 22, 2019

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OK, have seen what you mean. Did you edit the mouse points? It is a short video, I have created much longer videos. Here is one I converted to an interactive video:

Custom Play/Pause button

Of course, this is not a mp4 file. Will see if I can find the original video output.

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Community Beginner ,
May 22, 2019 May 22, 2019

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My example video shows the video demo without any edits made on the mouse points. I have subsequently edited the mouse points, producing marginal improvements. Even though I specify the exact frame I intend a mouse click to be, on play back it will still be off that frame.

Interestingly, I re-captured the video demo using a screen capture tool that comes with Windows 10 in Game Mode. The result showed the mouse synced in time, but the mouse cursor was positioned noticeably higher than from where I actually had it positioned. Since these examples both have erroneous mouse behaviour, this tells me that the method for capturing screen recordings gathers information for mouse activity separately to information gathered from the rest of the screen.

Anyway, since editing the mouse points in Captivate isn't as accurate as I hoped it would be, there doesn't seem to be much that can be done about this. I was hoping that this could be sorted out by clearing a cache or increasing the working memory, or something, but since mouse information is really captured as a separate entity, I think it just comes down to the poor quality of Captivate as a screen recording tool.

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Community Expert ,
May 23, 2019 May 23, 2019

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Software simulation is a lot more limited, especially for MP4 output. You cannot do non-destructive pan/zoom, the quality is much lower, and FMR slides can be tricky, do not always appear. But go ahead.... I find Video Demo a lot better.

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Community Beginner ,
May 23, 2019 May 23, 2019

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You're right. It's not ideal, plus the recorded result is slower than it was in real-time. Software Simulation won't work as a solution for every scenario I have. But, at least I have this one in sync and I can edit the video in Premiere to speed it up. Thanks for your input.

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Community Beginner ,
May 22, 2019 May 22, 2019

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Have you tried viewing/previewing in a different format? I've noticed that playback in HTML5 can play shapes (for example) with misaligned shadows and such while playback in SWF shows better results. Sometimes, the opposite happens.

Just a suggestion.

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Community Beginner ,
May 22, 2019 May 22, 2019

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Video Demos only allow for publication to video. So I've just tried capturing the demo using the Software Simulation project instead of a Video Demo project. I had to change the settings to remove the highlighted boxes on clicks, but the mouse behaviour is now in sync with this one. Because Software Simulations projects have the option to publish to video, this has proven to be a good work around to the Video Demo issue. Thanks for the suggestion!

Software Simulation example:

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