1. Macromedia Flash
2. Macromedia Captivate
3. Hyperionics HyperCam

With HyperCam, you still need to compress for online use. One way to do that is with Flash or Captivate. See article below.

Last update: September 9, 2005

Case Study:

Captivate vs. Flash

© 2005 by Michael Thomas Green

[Note: The comparison described in this article involved Flash MX 2004. Enhanced video features in Flash 8 make it even more attractive in comparison with Captivate. So the conclusion of the article is strengthened, not weakened, with the advent of Flash 8.]

I was recently asked to evaluate Captivate 1.0, in comparison to Flash MX 2004, as a tool for creating a series of online video-based tutorials. Many of the tutorials will deal with reports -- not so much how to run the reports (that's pretty straightforward), but when and why to run them and how to use the information to automate tasks, assess performance, or provide better advice or service to customers.

Captivate (formerly RoboDemo) is basically a screen capture program with some very cool bells and whistles aimed specifically at creating online demos and training materials. It outputs its captures as Flash files (SWFs). The Flash authoring tool has a much broader feature set, but does not specifically target creating online demos and training materials.

The client was leaning toward Captivate, since they had seen how quickly and easily they could create tutorials, complete with VCR-like controls, automatic highlighting of clicked buttons and links, automatic creation of text boxes with instructions ("Now click here."), and even interactivity. "We can turn these out like popcorn!" the client said enthusiastically after experimenting with Captivate for a few minutes.

However, after playing with Captivate for a few days, I came down strongly in favor of Flash for creating the tutorials, and the client agreed. I will share here the process by which we came to that conclusion.

The first thing we realized was that, of all the things that Captivate adds to the basic screen capture, the only two we felt were valuable for our tutorials were the VCR-like controls and the automatic highlighting.

How about text annotations? Captivate can create annotations automatically, and also allows you to create your own. However, we decided that we wanted the instructional message to be carried by the verbal narration. We turned off the text boxes that Captivate creates. We felt that they cluttered the screen and would detract from the user's ability to follow the action on the screen. And they didn't add any information that couldn't be gleaned just by watching the screen. We played with some of Captivate's color schemes for the text annotations, thinking perhaps we could make them less distracting, but ultimately decided that we just didn't like having text splashed across the screen capture.

Figure 1: Captivate text annotation and highlight (the red box)

Although we preferred verbal narration for delivering our message, we also had to take into account that many of the financial advisers did not have any audio capabilities on their PCs. So we would need to communicate our message through text, as well. We decided to put the text at the bottom of the screen, outside the screen capture area.

Given this approach, we saw no advantage in using Captivate, as far as text annotation went. in fact, we saw a potential disadvantage in the fact that Captivate automatically divides the screen capture into separate "slides." Some extra work would be involved in extending a text annotation across more than one slide.

Captivate's slide-based authoring environment is based on a rather brilliant approach to creating screen capture movies while keeping file sizes small. The central insight is that, at any given moment, very little is usually changing on the screen. Most of the time, it's just a mouse cursor and moving. So why not just use one unchanging graphic as a background, create a tiny graphic for the mouse cursor, and then animate just that tiny graphic? This approach dramatically reduces the number of bits that need to the stored, in comparison with a typical video, which repeats the unchanging portions of the screen, frame after frame.

However, for our purposes, the automatic division of the tutorial into slides often turned out to make editing cumbersome. For example, we really liked the idea of highlight boxes that draw the viewer's eye to a button or link that is about to be clicked. However, the highlight boxes were coming and going faster than we wanted. Each one lasts only three seconds. There is no way to change that default duration. We would have to go in and edit them one by one. That seemed unfortunate enough. Then, to make matters worse, as with text annotations, it was basically twice the work if we wanted a highlight box to cross two slides.

Even when the default duration happened to work for us, we often didn't like the precise timing. In fact, the default timing frequently stank, because the highlight box would appear before the button was even visible on the screen. We would have had to edit most highlight boxes, for duration, timing, or both.

A potential workaround for this problem is to create your own library of often used objects (such as highlight boxes), which you can copy-paste from one Captivate project to another. When pasted, the objects retain all their attributes, including duration, timing, placement, etc.

However, placement and timing for highlight boxes were not predictable, so we would have to adjust those each time after copy-pasting.It was faster to skip all the copy-pasting and just adjust the duration and timing.

In the Flash authoring environment, we would have to place each highlight box and manually adjust its duration and timing. However, we would place each box just once on a single timeline. No slides, and therefore no double effort for crossing slides. All in all, Flash required less work relating to highlight boxes.

We also decided that the ability to create interactive demos in which the user gets instructions, attempts to follow them and gets feedback ("Please try again.") was not particularly valuable for our application. The button-clicking part of what we were demonstrating was very straightforward, and we had no doubt that users would be able to follow those instructions. What could be more difficult was explaining the reasons for what we were doing, and interpreting the results. The user could not prove his or her understanding of the meat of our message by clicking buttons.

We really liked the VCR-like controls that Captivate can automatically add to each movie. There is a component with similar capabilities in Flash, but we liked the one in Captivate better. In fact, the Flash component really didn't suit our needs. However, I had previously created VCR-like controls in Flash and knew that I could adapt them to create what we needed for our tutorials. So the controls were a point in Captivate's favor, but not a show-stopper.

With all these considerations, we still hadn't quite made up our minds. We liked the idea that we could give Captivate to a subject matter expert in any department in the company, and he or she could create a tutorial which would be almost ready to go, with just a little bit of editing on our part. And all the tutorials would be similar in style, just based on the configuration of Captivate. Flash might be easier for me, since I had used it extensively in the past. For others, Captivate would definitely be more approachable and have an easier learning curve.

However, we soon realized that there would be no great disadvantage in our using Flash and others, if they preferred, using Captivate. We could create tutorials in Flash similar enough in design and behavior to those created in Captivate that users would have no trouble moving between the two.

If the delivery mechanism had been different, that would have been a big problem. The companies using these tutorials are quite cautious about introducing any new technology to their workstations. They go through an exhaustive testing and acceptance process. However, in this case, the delivery mechanism is simply the browser with the Flash plug-in: exactly the same, whether the tutorial is originally created in Flash or Captivate.

We did consider the cost of the applications, but Flash at $699 was not that much more expensive than Captivate at $499. All other things being equal, we would of course go with the less expensive application. But in reality, other considerations would probably outweigh such a small cost differential.

The real clincher came when we looked at file sizes. Creating a screen capture video with HyperCam (http://www.hyperionics.com), importing it into Flash, and then publishing a SWF, we got file sizes close to half those of the SWFs created by Captivate. Adding highlights, text, and VCR controls did not add significantly to the file size created by Flash. For example, in one case a movie came out 2.5MB from Flash and 4MB from Captivate. We could detect no difference in the quality of the audio or video. (Both were excellent.)

We also realized that this workflow would work perfectly well for subject matter experts creating tutorials. They could simply record with HyperCam, and we would bring the resulting AVI file into Flash and do the finishing touches. This approach also has the advantage that HyperCam is a $40 application, with volume discounts available, so cost would not be a barrier to distributing it widely within the company.

In general, the big disadvantage of Flash is the learning curve. However, for what we wanted to do for our tutorials, half an hour would be ample for showing a novice Flash user the ropes. The same is not necessarily true when it comes to creating interactive tutorials. For interactive tutorials, other departments may still decide to use Captivate, due to Flash's learning curve.