Another AVI Newbie Post (reposted from another thread)

Question

Hi, this post answered a big question that I had...couple things I ran into when I tried to export to AVI.

Summary: Client wants to publish the screencaps as standalone vids in addition to the work that we're doing to sync the screencaps with video and ppt files. When I try and publish to AVI Captivate usually freezes up a short way into the publish and stops working. I've tried using several deifferent codecs in teh dropdown and they all are spotty.

Possible issues (to help diagnose my issue).

    * I'm new to captivate and doing something stupid since I'm a newbie
    * I'm waiting till the trial ends to actually purchase...so I am trying to do this using a trial version...a legit trial mind you...downloaded from Adobe...not a torrent site
    * I'm on an AMD machine. Can this software really not run on an AMD machine? Do I need an intel processor? I'm coming from a Mac and not sure how this could be possible...but anything's possible!
    * I'm bringing in projects from Captivate 3. I'm also having the issues with Captivate 4 files, but thought I'd bring this up.
    * I'm using Vista

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

nickmv · Answer

I was having the same problem until I let it sit for a while and noticed that it froze for about a minute, but then continued processing! So, it may not actually be frozen, it is just very slow and the encoding buffer fills up and needs to catch up or something like that. You may want to set it to start before you go to bed for the night and it might be done by next weekend...

However, I discovered other issues that made the .AVI exporting functionality almost completely useless:

1) Output codecs stink. One of them wouldn't even work, it just said "An Error Has Occurred!" and closed. The others suffered from issue #2

2) Large file sizes. Using the "Cinepak Codec by Radius" yielded a 4 slide, 40 second video (with no audio for it) with a file size of over 35 MB! So I tried using Xvid, which is generally considered to be a "good" video codec, yet somehow ended up with a 1.4 GB (yes, gigabyte) file! That is absolutely incredible!! I haven't even bothered trying to play it for fear that my system will run out of memory. (Using the Microsoft Video 1 codec yielded a slightly better result of 19 MB for the same video).

3) It always uses the C: drive for "working" swap or w/e. My video was actually much larger than 4 slides, but I cut out 36 slides in order to try and get a complete video after a few unsuccessful tries where it filled my C: drive. The first time I just let it run my C: drive quickly ran out of room! It filled 7 GB and wasn't even halfway done! So I made sure to change all my working and output directories to the D: drive (which has tons more space), but it still used the C: drive for working swap data, filling my drive again! (This happened with most of the codecs I tried.) The only positive thing I have to say is that once I hit "Cancel" it removed all of this data and freed up the space.

Anyways, I am giving up on publishing any movies as an .AVI through Captivate 4. The functionality appears to be almost completely broken.

For what it's worth, I am using Intel hardware running XP Pro.

And as always, YMMV.

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