Captivate is great for making CBTs (computer based tutorials) and screencasts. It is primarily a screen based recording application. This means you can ask it to start recording your desktop, with icons, programs, clicks and everything you do, as a video. The resulting video can then be edited and used in various ways - to help a friend understand a task and complete it, to record a sequence of actions when reporting a bug, to assist with e-learning, and so on.

Made by Adobe, Captivate starts out with an advantage for it is able to use the Flash format in a way that its competitors cannot - make editable flash files. Besides recording the screen, Captivate can build and edit podcasts, interactive demos, and games.



This it does by using event based screen captures - snapping a sequence of screenshots and simulating mouse movement to make it look like running video. You can then edit these files to zoom in on a specified area, add mouse roll-overs, clickable text boxes, captions, narration (including text-to-speech voice-overs), etc. Presentations in Captivate do not restrict you only to the content that has been recorded by you. Images, videos, audio, and PowerPoint files can be imported, to enrich the video you're creating. Once you're done, the result can be exported to various formats, including FLV, SWF, and standard video AVI files. A cool feature introduced with version 4 of Captivate, is the Adobe Captivate Reviewer. You can choose to email a presentation for review, and the recipients can add comments upon specific frames while watching the video presentation. On the whole, the learning curve of Captivate 4 is not very steep. To make full use of it though, you need to already be familiar with the kind of user interface seen in Adobe's products, and do some fine-tuning in Adobe Flash when required.