Analyzing bandwidth

Captivate allows you to view how much bandwidth a selected movie requires. You can see how much bandwidth each slide requires and how well the slides stream over a variety of connections. With this knowledge, you can make movie adjustments as necessary.

To analyze movie bandwidth:

  1. Open a Captivate movie.

  2. From the View menu, select Bandwidth Analysis.

The Bandwidth Monitor dialog box appears.

  1. This dialog box contains three tabs: Slide Summary, Graph, and Movie Summary. Navigate through the tabs as desired.

    Slide Summary: This tab displays information about each movie frame.

    • KB per sec: (Kilobytes per second) As a rule of thumb, any frame with less than 3 KB per second streams well over a modem Internet connection. Frames with larger amounts of bandwidth may, depending upon several factors, cause pausing in movie playback. If previous frames require lower bandwidth than a frame requiring larger bandwidth, the higher bandwidth frame may download at an acceptable speed. Note that the first frame in a movie always has a longer KB per second because it is the first frame to load and additional movie information must load with it.

    • Seconds: The frame duration in seconds.

    • Video (KB): The size of any included video.

    • Audio (KB): The size of any included audio.

    Graph: This tab reveals how the movie streams across time for different modem and broadband speeds. You can view high-bandwidth frames and note how they appear on common connection types.

    Movie Summary: This tab displays movie summary information. Both the size and KB per second re listed for each movie item. Size is much less significant than KB per second. For example, a 500K movie running for 60 seconds streams at 8.3 KB per second and requires a broadband connection. On the other hand, a 2000K movie running for ten minutes streams at 3.3KB per second, and this one streams well even on a low speed modem connection.

    Note: After you have identified the frames requiring high bandwidth, you can reduce their impact on the movie by extending the timing for the high-bandwidth frame or the preceding frame(s). You only need to do this if you are tight on bandwidth and notice distracting pauses during movie playback over the Internet.

  2. (Optional) Click Print to print the information displayed.

  3. Click OK.

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