But the way I see it, TechSmith's products are not designed to be a total e-learning solution, but rather a part of a complete solution: the screen capturing portion. In fact programmers from Captivate have migrated to Articulate I'm told by someone at Articulate. The way I see it, Captivate's main competitor is Articulate and perhaps a nod to TechSmith's products SnagIt and Camtasia. I like their products and workflow and integration, etc.

I'm an Adobe fan-boy - I have the Creative Suite CS2 (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, ImageReady) I have Acrobat Standard I have Premiere Pro 2.0 and Captivate 3. You should check out this blog ( ) and see if you start drooling over Articulate's products instead of the Adobe lust that most of us suffer. So I would recommend looking for another application other than Captivate 3 for your full motion video screen captures. When you want to add in captions or buttons later, you have to copy/paste them from slide to slide until you reach your desired duration. Rather than displaying the entire capture in a single long timeline, you get several slides, each with its own short timeline. This in itself doesn't seem to be a problem, but it is when you want to edit your captured video.

My complaint about full motion video captures with Captivate 3 is that it captures by creating several small packets of full motion video. I might agree with this statement (but I haven't any experience with Camtasia). You were told video should be captured in Camtasia, but flash quizzes and post production should be finalized in Captivate. I can say that for full motion video capture, Captivate 3 may work for you, but I feel it is less than stellar in this particular function. I have not used Camtasia, but I do use Captivate 3.

Snagit alternative forum