The Editing Phase

Once you finish recording, you can move on to the editing phase—the next step in the Captivate development cycle. Although the recording phase influences file size the most, you can affect file size considerably during the editing phase.

To take full advantage of the steps in this section, you must be familiar with the Bandwidth Monitor inside Captivate.

Play the demo: Introducing the Captivate Bandwidth Monitor

Note: Before you begin the editing phase, make sure you back up your project. If you accidentally remove anything that you needed, you can use the original file without recapturing your entire movie.

Removing Excess Slides

If you use the auto-recording feature inside Captivate, there is a chance that you might have extra captured screens that are unnecessary in your demonstration. The Captivate auto-recording feature is event-driven—for instance, a mouse click, window loading, and so forth—so any time a system event happens, a screen is captured. This can produce extra slides in a demonstration if you are recording an application that creates many system events.

To minimize your file sizes, remove any extra slides that do not add any value to the presentation. A good tool for identifying slides that do not need to be included in a demonstration is the Bandwidth Monitor. You can open the Bandwidth monitor by clicking View > Bandwidth Analysis from within Captivate. Look for slides on the Slide Summary tab. If the slide time is less than one second, there is a good chance that you can remove it. A very short slide time indicates that very little action occurs on the slide. For example, a slide that lasts less than one second could simply show the a clicking effect on a button, which helps create a more realistic demonstration or simulation but does not make training more or less effective.

Note: Many Captivate authors err on the side of capturing too many slides during the recording phase. This is a good idea because it is more difficult to record additional slides later than it is to delete slides you've already made. Just make sure to clean up and remove excess slides during the editing phase to reduce your file size.

Importing and Using Media

Below are five different imported or media elements that can affect file size.

Audio

Many Captivate authors include audio narration or background music in their presentations, which often adds significantly to the value of a presentation. However, you should be aware that including audio in your presentations adds to the file size. I cover adding audio in more detail in the section Audio Compression Settings.

Images

If you insert large images, expect your Captivate file size to grow more than if you insert small images.

PowerPoint Slides

Importing Microsoft PowerPoint slides with a large color depth, or with many color gradients, increases the size of your Captivate files. Limit the amount of colors used in your imported PowerPoint presentations.

Animation

Inserting any type of animation into a Captivate project will increase its file size. The increased size depends upon the type of animation you import. Captivate currently supports four formats of imported animation—SWF, GIF, FLA, and AVI:

• SWF: Inserting SWF animation into your Captivate project can be an excellent way to add animation to your project. Because SWF is an optimized format, it is ideal for adding animation. Your file size should increase only by about the same amount as your inserted SWF file.
• GIF: Much like inserting SWF animation into your project, GIF animation increases your project size by only about the same amount as the size of the GIF file.
• FLA: Inserting FLA animation into your Captivate project is no different than adding SWF content. When you insert a FLA file into your project, Captivate launches Flash and converts the FLA file to the SWF format.
• AVI: When you import an AVI file into Captivate, it converts the AVI file to the SWF format. Captivate wraps the AVI file inside a SWF file. Importing an AVI is like importing a rotoscoped video into the project. In rotoscoped video, each video frame becomes an image. This means that in Captivate, each frame becomes a slide. So a 30-second AVI file at 30 frames per second adds 900 slides to the project. If it's important to use video-based animations, consider some of the options mentioned in the following section on video.

Note: Captivate supports only the importing of SWF content published for Flash Player 6 or later.

Video

Using video inside a project is an important consideration to make when developing optimized Captivate content. Flash and other Flash development programs increasingly use video inside Flash content. There are alternatives to importing AVIs into Captivate. If you have Flash, for example, you can embed a video into a SWF file or link the SWF file to a video and stream it into the SWF file you import into Captivate. If file size is an important issue, it is best to avoid embedding or importing the video directly into the SWF file. For a full explanation of the alternatives to embedding the video in the SWF, read this section of Flash Video Learning Guide: Delivery Options for Flash Video.

Check out Captivate Primer: Tips, Tricks & Techniques by Tom Green for more information about using streaming video inside Captivate.

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