MadCap Software Forums

Hi,

My Flash output has two grey bars in the upper region of the movie. I am using Mimic V3. They seem to me ghost impressions of a progress bar. Does anyone know how to get rid of them?

Thanks,

Joost

You can turn off the grey progress bar (and the Madcap Logo) by editing the skin Movie properties, edit skin, toolbar Top, Enable custom and then pick the items you want included.

Sometimes you will get artefacts from the host application.

For example, I often see ghosted images of a context menu. I'm not sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with the feature Mimic uses to capture animations within a frame.

I use the print screen button to take a 'safety' frame before and after each operation. These frames are easily deleted if they are not needed, but come in handy if you have an artefact.

With your existing movie, open the frame in something like photoshop. If the artefact is on the frame's background bitmap you should be able to fix it here, depending on your photoshop skills.

HTH

The way how Mimic (and most other applications of this kind) records frames is by detecting triggers from the window manager as well as mouse clicks, keyboard entries, and other events. The problem is that these triggers sometimes don't fire exactly when the event happens, or better to say, when the result is seen on screen. It can be that the trigger is delayed, so you get the frame with content after the event happened, which may include already a new change. Likewise, the screen refresh can be delayed, so the trigger fires before the event can be seen on screen. I have yet to come across an application that gets this straight reliably. My guess it is a flaw in the window manager, that for most uses is of no concern.
The old advice is valid here as well: hammer the capture hot key when recording. It is much easier to delete a few frames later on than to try to magically produce something that isn't there. Maybe MadCap found a trick to get better results and presents it in the next version.

That said, now I wonder if you see the grey bars in the frames already or do they only show up in the Flash output?