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GeoffB_NYC
Participating Frequently
August 23, 2015
Question

Two brief file size questions

  • August 23, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 260 views

Hello all

I'm producing a demo course for a company which uses Adobe e-learning suite tools exclusively, and has asked me to produce a demo. If I pass the test, I'm up for a position.

I just finished the demo course had two videos, which were both converted to relatively lightweight.mp4 versions. The whole course is about 9 mins and change.

When I published the course out for review, its total size was 34.7 MB. Is this considered a heavy size course for its duration? Also, if I shorted the duration of each slide to play for a maximum of say 1000 seconds instead of 2000 seconds, does that do anything to lighten the overall size of the course?

Thanks in advance.

Geoff

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    1 reply

    RodWard
    Community Expert
    RodWardCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 23, 2015

    Geoff,

    HTML/SWF content with audio voiceover, images, text and animation usually comes out at between 500 kb to 1 megabyte per minute of playtime.  So, it would be about 5-10 megabytes for the same length of play time.

    Video output will usually be about 10 times the size of SWF.  So 34 megs of MP4 video would not be considered unreasonable for a 9 minute presentation.

    Why do you have your slides set to play for 2000 seconds?  That's nearly 20 minutes of play time per slide. The default slide timing in Captivate is only 3 seconds, and in most cases you would never want it to me more than a minute.

      G
      GeoffB_NYCAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      August 23, 2015

      Hi Rod

      Thanks for the reply.

      Being new to Captivate, I'm also new to its timeline concept. I was trained in Lectora about 11 years ago and until now have never used Captivate (or Articulate for that matter).

      In Lectora slides sit in place statically and don't adhere to any time parameter, which threw me off a bit from the get-go. I have some of my Captivate slides inadvertently set at a whopping 10,000 seconds.

      Would it be recommended to set the master slide to a minute universally so that the course stays uniform from a length of time perspective?...and in doing so, does this lighten the load-in of the course?

      Thanks. G

      Lilybiri
      Lilybiri
      Legend
      August 23, 2015

      I'm not Rod, timeline is the core of Captivate, you really need to get familiar with it. Long time ago I wrote an article that is mostly still valid (screenshots will look different however):

      Tiny Timeline Tidbits - Captivate blog

      Keep the default slide duration of 3 seconds. Only reasons why that duration should increase:

      • you have slide audio that takes longer (you will automatically get the question to increase slide duration to duration of audio clip)
      • you are staggering objects on the timeline; be aware that splitting up a slide in different slides will not break the user experience and makes slides easier to manage

      If you want to give the user time to watch a slide, simply add an interactive object that has a pause. That can be a button, a click box or (my favourite) a shape button. It could be a custom 'Next' button or the user could use the Next or Play button on the playbar to release that pause. The big problem with CP8 and CP9 is that newbie UI that hides the Timeline by default which is in my opinion not very wise.

      Why I like Shape Buttons - Captivate 6! - Captivate blog

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