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Captivate Review
March 31, 2017

Captivate Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Captivate

I use Captivate to edit video lectures in a research methods class. A few other people in the department use it. It helps us bring instructor presence to our online students. We have other lecture capture tools that do this as well, but Captivate provides more flexibility in terms of combining and working with multi-media.
  • Captivate is good for fine tuning multi-modal presentations. I have a course that has undergone a name change. With Captivate I could edit my current presentations without have to re-record the entire lecture.
  • Captivate offers a large amount of transitions and effects. These helps give online lectures a polished look.
  • Captivate exports to a wide range of video qualities and formats, which makes it easy to get finished lectures into our learning management system.
  • The learning curve for adding and manipulation effects can be quite steep. If I haven't used Captivate in a while, it takes several minutes to remember how things work.
  • Audio editing could be improved by making it easier to place edit markers without having to pause the play cursor at a given spot.
  • Recording new audio or video to an existing presentation makes my Captivate crash. I've had to record audio in a separate program and import as media. Fixing this bug would be very helpful.
  • To be frank, ROI is difficult to measure at this point in an academic institution, but I do find that in general, online students respond well to seeing and hearing an instructor's face and voice. This has probably helped improve student evaluations in my online classes, would be a metric that most higher ed instructors would be concerned with.
  • I suppose a negative impact would be time investment. However this can be mitigated by re-using materials when appropriate.
  • My use this quarter has involved editing pre-existing lectures. I've been able to shorted several lectures and I've been able to break up one lecture that was way too long into two smaller, more modular lectures. This has helped improve the class without forcing me to re-record the same lecture.
Canvas
Adobe Captivate is well suited to creating robust multi-modal lectures of online distribution. It takes longer to create lectures in Captivate than in other programs, so you should plan on crafting and creating a presentation that will be usable more than once. For quick video check-ins or overviews, other tools may be better integrated into the learning management system that are easier to use and produce video with.