Does Mimic actually work?

[NorthEast]

This might seem like a stupid question, but for the life of me I cannot get Mimic to record a really simple movie.

For example, I've just tried to record a simple sequence in Flare 4.2.
What I was trying to record was:

1. I selected the File menu, and clicked Properties.
2. The properties window appeared, then I clicked Cancel to close it.

When I come to play back the movie, what I see is:

1. Instead of a click on the File menu item, the mouse click is slightly below and to the right (so it appears to click the new project toolbar icon).
2. Instead of a click on the Properties menu item, the mouse click is a long way off to the right (about 250px) and slightly too high.
3. The properties window is not recorded at all (so the click on its Cancel button appears to be in 'mid-air').

I'm not sure what Mimic is primarily designed to do, but I'd expect it to be able to record a sequence of fairly basic actions without messing up every single event. It's not specific to a particular application, I've tested this in notepad, Outlook, and windows menus/dialogs, but it is equally as bad at recording everything. The movie recording was like this in v1, and it doesn't appear to have progressed at all.

[RamonS]

You ran into the "nobody can get this to work" trap. I've used my fair share of screen recording applications over the years and the ones that work well are those who create avi files as they capture the entire screen between 15 and 30 times per second. That makes for nice movies, the problem is they are difficult to edit and HUGE. What Mimic, Craptivate ex-RoboDemo, and all the others do is hook into system triggers, that are also used by any other application to detect mouse movement, mouse clicks, and so on. The problem is that the events typically fire before the screen refresh occurred and that there seems to be no trigger for the "screen was refreshed" state. That really sucks big time and so far no demo program I know of reliably handles that. You get lucky sometimes and the app is busy doing something else before it gets to capture the screen content. But then again it may that this business causes the capture to come in too late. I wish for MadCap to be the first ones who get a handle on that, but I guess they need to kick quite a few knee caps at Microsoft before getting to that stage. And given that Microsoft still uses the same file system as it did 20 years ago I don't expect any innovation of any kind to ever come out of Redmond....unless they happen to buy a company. Sorry, I digress.

There is a cheesy workaround for this. While capturing movies keep hammering the manual screen capture key (I think it is the typical PrintScreen, but you can change that). You end up with 20 frames from which you can pick the 3 or 4 that you really need and then throw the other ones away. That is much faster than relying on what Mimic produces automatically. And yes, switching into paranoid mode is a must here, rather capture the same thing five times than not at all. Deleting frames is easy, crafting your own takes half an hour.

I know it's boopid, MadCap knows that, Adobe/Macromedia should know it (after all I complained enough about Craptivate), and the others for sure heard it as well. Given that it is a horrible shortcoming in all these applications I am convinced it is a deficiency that comes with Windows. Otherwise there would be no reason to make an app like this work that badly.

So, keep hammering the capture key and then throw the excess out. Welcome to demo land! At least Mimic doesn't crash permanently like Craptivate, which then also hoses you project beyond repair.

[NorthEast]

I've been using (Macromedia) Captivate v1 for nearly 4 years now, and for recording on-screen events it is still head-and-shoulders above Mimic 3. (I'm only considering upgrading Captivate because I'll need to use Vista at some point.)

In most applications and scenarios Captivate works very well in the 'auto-capture' mode (using the system triggers). It also has a 'full-motion' recording mode for getting live action, say for recording a drag-and-drop movement or some animated content on a web page - so that's effectively like the avi recording method you mentioned. Your movie can contain a mixture of both recording modes, and you can switch between them whilst recording, so you get the best of both worlds.

In auto-capture mode you will sometimes have to insert a 'manual' capture, but you can normally guess when you need to do that, e.g. if a window is slow to draw Capture might grab the image too early (it makes a click noise so you know when it happens). That isn't something you have to do very often though, and it certainly isn't anything like as bad as Mimic where you have to do it all the time because you can't rely on Mimic to capture anything.
So, I understand there's a workaround in Mimic, I'm just perplexed as to why it has an 'automatic' recording mode, when that feature clearly doesn't work well enough to be usable. It isn't doing what it says on the tin.

Also, the other issue I had was the accuracy of the on-screen mouse clicks. In my test movie, every single mouse click was positioned in the wrong place, usually by about 20 pixels, but sometimes about quarter of the screen away. If I need to re-position every single click, then that's no good at all.

I'm sure Mimic is probably quite strong in other areas, but its recording capabilities seem to be quite poor.

[RamonS]

You must have a different Craptivate then. I have to point out that I used it last two years ago and back then it wasn't any better than Mimic.

[NorthEast]

I still use Captivate v1. Sometimes I think I must have a different Mimic to everyone else though.

[SG]

Just want to chime in here about Captivate... We're using Captivate 3 and very happy with it. We have many animated tutorials in our online help--all created in Captivate. From time to time, it doesn't capture properly; but we can usually figure out a way to replace poorly recorded screens. Quite pricey, though.

SG

[RamonS]

I didn't say that Craptivate doesn't work at all, it is just that on the systems I used it the whole thing was crash happy and a hosed project was unrecoverable despite the feature to do exactly that. I do think that Craptivate has way more features compared to Mimic especially in the eLearning arena, but from a bare bones screen capturing aspect I think Mimic and Craptivate do the exact same bad job.

[forfear]

... but from a bare bones screen capturing aspect I think Mimic and Craptivate do the exact same bad job.

oooph...that's harsh..

but it sounds rather catchy oddly.

[RamonS]

Yea, that harsh, what I expect is the same result as what I'd get from a screen AVI, just with a way smarter approach to how many frames are used and how the mouse projectory is recorded. I found that both Mimic and Craptivate are bazillion light years away from accomplishing that, as well as many other tools I used. That is why I get the impression as that Windows is just not capable of providing the tools what they need, or at least does that highly unreliably. In that case I'd expect that the apps bring their own smarts into the process, but they don't.
I understand Dave's frustration as I encountered the same issues, but in my case it was with Craptivate as well as Mimic, with the difference that Craptivate morphed into a Crashtivate as soon as the movie had more than three frames. Crashing is one thing, but every time Crashtivate crashed it totally hosed my project. So I spent more time making backups than working in Crashtivate.

[Richard Ferrell]

What kind of an appliation were you trying to record with Mimic? Web based? I have seen issues that web based ones may not work as well.

[NorthEast]

What kind of an appliation were you trying to record with Mimic? Web based? I have seen issues that web based ones may not work as well.

The example I was talking about was with Flare v4; but I've also tried it in Outlook, Notepad, and some general Windows stuff.

[Madcap Guru]

I would open a support ticket as it should be working correctly

[NorthEast]

I would open a support ticket as it should be working correctly

Will do.

Welcome to the forums, mystery MadCap Guru. :o)

[Madcap Guru]

Those support guys are great people, they can figure out most issues...