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A
Anonymous
February 20, 2012
Question

Published Captivate SWF file sizes

  • February 20, 2012
  • 2 replies
  • 1748 views

Hello everyone

I have a question regarding the final published Flash file size of Captivate 5.5 projects.....

We spend a lot of time and effort ensuring all our courses are optimised to be as efficient as they can be in terms of image quality, richness of the learning experience, slide interactions and effects and audio narration. Projects are typically 50 - 90 slides long, with a typical duration of between 30 - 60 minutes study time.

However we have come under recent pressure from our ICT manager to reduce the file sizes of our published projects. He is suggesting 1 MB, and current published projects are anything between 10 - 17 MB. We are concerned this pressure is going to undo all of our hard work with a resulting loss of quality.

Can I ask everyone.... typically what published SWF file sizes are you generating for projects of a similar size? And does anyone have any tips and techniques to reduce the file size to its smallest amount without too much compromise on the loss of quality? What do you do to overcome the trade off between file size and the quality of the project?

Is there anywhere I can look up what  typical Captivate project sizes are.... as he is quoting 400kb as a large project... and to me that seems quite an unrealistic goal. ! (To test this I created a blank 800x600 Captivate project and just put one text caption on each slide - the resulting published Flash file was already 272 kb!).

Any help greatly appreciated.

many thanks in advance,

Loraine

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    Anjaneai_Srivastava
    Adobe Employee
    Anjaneai_Srivastava
    Adobe Employee
    February 20, 2012

    Hello Loraine,

    I would say that, the expectation are quite high, and without knowing the exact content of 50-90 Slides, I can state it to be very difficult to achieve or predict the output size.

    The Size and Quality parameters mere shift the compression ratio of project.

    We cannot compare two projects on the number slide versus size graph, which means, there are several factors that involve in desision of project size including, Colors, Resolution, Duration, Number of Objects--Size, Quality and Format Type on each slide, Flash version for output. So, there is no guideline that we can state for the same.

    I am sharing few articles, trying following them and learn more about optimizing project output with various content in project.You can try controlling the size to an extent--

    http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2010/07/balancing-image-quality-and-swf-output-size-in-cp-5-1.html

    http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/861/cpsid_86137.html

    Hope it helps.

    Thanks,

    Anjaneai

      RodWard
      Community Expert
      RodWardCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      February 21, 2012

      My projects consist of several modules about 5-8 minutes in duration, and all have text, graphics, animation (mostly just in Captivate), plus audio voiceover with about 7-10 assessment questions at the end.  As a rule of thumb I find that I need to allow between 750kb to 1 megabyte per minute of content for finished published filesize.

      Your manager is not being realistic to expect a 30 minute course to be only 1 meg.  He might get that target with HTML pages and nothing but text, but he can forget multimedia.

        A
        Anonymous
        February 21, 2012

        Many thanks for all your replies and thoughts on this. I think he is beginning to appreciate that 1MB is unrealistic for a published Captivate file after having a look at the various Captivate forums and blog posts around. And thanks to RodWard for your rough gauge of 750-1MB per minute.... Its something I can bear in mind in future.

        I have in the meantime been looking into the blog links provided by Anjaneai and been looking further into the individual slide quality settings. I'd always left it as a general setting and customised this in the Publish Settings dialog box.(i.e. not ticked 'Retain slide quality settings').

        Interestingly enough, I had many screens with PNG images on them, where i'd isolated out a portion of the image previously in Photoshop (i.e. a cut out photo of a person instead of a rectangular photo of them) however when testing using the JPEG Quality setting on a slide, this isolated cut out effect remained.... I was expecting the PNG to return to a rectangular shape with the isolated portions appearing as a flat or white colour background. This didn't happen, so the published SWF appeared fine. I could have an isolated shape moving across a patterned background and it still worked fine..! and my published file size has been drastically reduced to boot! (I'm not sure why this has done this, as I know that JPEG does not support transparency... but it seems to be producing an effect i'm happy with, so I'm not going to balk at that).
        I've also changed all my Master slide backgrounds from PNG to JPEG files. So, for a 100 slide project with a duration of 52 mins that was initially publishing the SWF at 11,427kb I've now managed to shave this down to 7,800kb without losing the quality we desire!
        Many thanks for your help. It's not 1MB, and I know it never will be, but that's 32% off the file size thanks to your help
        I'm sure i'll get even more off that when I start looking at audio recording settings too...
        Loraine
          Lilybiri
          Lilybiri
          Legend
          February 20, 2012

          Hi Loraine,


          That is totally unrealistic. I have Captivate published SWF's on my blog and they are between 5 and 50MB. For tutorials on our LMS I do deploy until more than 100MB. Is your equipment and bandwidth really that bad? Seems like numbers dating from last century, sorry to sound a bit sarcastic.

          Lilybiri

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