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wdolphin
Known Participant
March 22, 2018
Question

Captivate 2017 - How to reduce file size and decrease load times

  • March 22, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 2212 views

I have a module I created in Captivate 2017.  It is 36,525 KB and the load time is too long.   I divided the module up into three files and wrote an advanced actiion on the last slide to open another project which links to the next section I broke up.  The now three file sizes are as follows File #1  - 25,575 KB   File #2  24,892 KB,  File #3  22,507KB.  How can this be when the original file zize was 36KB and now these are still so large.  

I manually calculated the image and audio KB and it comes out to be  3,952.41   KB   - Where is the other KB coming from.  The library is clean and all unused items are gone.  

Any help in knowing how to reduce these file sizes would be appreciated.  

 

Thank you 

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

mary1492
Participant
August 25, 2018

How do you call one Captivate file from another one? Will that speed up play time?

Anne

Lilybiri
Legend
August 25, 2018

What do you mean?

mary1492
Participant
August 27, 2018

I meant in runtime, how do you start another Captivate file from another one, but I realized that is not going to work.

eLearning_Pundits
Participating Frequently
March 28, 2018

You may want to delete unused items from Library to reduce the project size.

Lilybiri
Legend
March 28, 2018

Deleting Unused items in the Library only reduces the file size of the cptx-file. It will have no effect whatsoever on the file size of the published project.  The question in this trhead is about published projects, since the title talks about 'loading time'.

RodWard
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 29, 2018

@Marion,

You mentioned something about a 'template'.  Are these CPTX projects spawned from an initial CPTL template in any way?

If so, that might be part of your problem.  Please confirm.

RodWard
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 22, 2018

Dividing a module up won't necessarily drop the file size evenly because a certain percentage of the published output is related to all the files and code required for the interface and default functionality.

If you open up a new CPTX with only one slide and no content whatsoever, publish that to HTML5, the output will be around 3 megabytes. 

If your content is using Master Slides that have graphics and backgrounds reused across slides then these will be present in all modules as well.  If you inserted hi-res images into the project and just resized them down by dragging in the corners, you've only changed the display size for that image, not the final filesize

Are these SCORM modules that are going to be uploaded to an LMS?

RodWard
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 22, 2018

Forgot to mention:

If you suspect that your files have become unnecessarily bloated, there's an easy way to try and get rid of it.  Just open a new CPTX file at the same height and width as your current one, and then paste in all files from one of your separated modules into that blank project file.  Only objects, variables and Advanced Actions that are actually USED on the slides will come across.

Then test publish to see whether you end up with a significantly reduced file size.  If you do, then clean up that new project file and continue with that one (but keep the old one just in case something hasn't come across in the copy and paste).

wdolphin
wdolphinAuthor
Known Participant
March 22, 2018

Ron, thank you I will try this and let you know how it works out.  Just a FYI these are not on a LMS or published as SCROM they are direct links off our server.