Captivate, Macromedia’s reincarnation of RoboDemo, is a powerful, easy-to-use tool for creating professional quality demos, interactive tutorials and handouts.  Its organization and usability are intuitive enough that I was quickly and easily able to produce a basic application simulation complete with auto-generated captions and narration.

The tool allows you to narrate while recording, add voice-overs/sound effects at the end or to synch background music in mp3 format to the “movie”.  Re-recording is kept to a minimum since all text boxes, mouse paths, audio recordings and display times for individual frames are editable.  Editing is simple since Captivate saves screen images as individual slides which can be manipulated in the edit view by dragging and dropping controls, superimposing outside images and setting slide properties.  Though I did not try this – apparently, you can seamlessly incorporate Power Point presentations into your project and save them in Flash format.  The edit view also contains a timeline which makes it easy to view the current slide in its context to the overall project and re-order, if desired.