Over the years, I’ve developed hundreds, if not thousands, of Captivate projects–also known as movies. And I’ve been teaching Captivate around the country since before Captivate was known as Captivate (for those of you who are new to Captivate, the program used to be called RoboDemo back in the day).
One of the most frequently asked questions I hear from clients and students is: "On average, how much time should I budget to record and produce each lesson?"
The amount of time it will take to record and clean up a project is based largely on the size of the project. So let’s determine project size. Captivate projects are based on the number of slides, similar to PowerPoint. I break project sizes into four categories:
- Small: Up to 20 or 30 slides
- Medium: Up to 60 or 80 slides
- Large: Up to 100 or 120 slides
- Jumbo: 130 slides and beyond
I believe that each Captivate project you create should be kept as small as possible to achieve your goals for the lesson. And you should develop lessons that a user can complete in five minutes or less. Why?
- Smaller projects are simply faster to produce than larger projects
- Smaller projects typically result in a smaller published SWF file. Since smaller SWFs stream and begin playing for your users faster than large SWFs, it just makes sense to produce small SWFs.
- Adult learners are busy. They may be stressed out and possibly distracted. Some of your learners won’t be enthusiastic because, to be quite honest, many of them are being forced to take your lessons for one reason or another. If you make your lessons too long, the effectiveness of your lessons may be minimized.
Here is a real-world scenario: You have been hired to produce a one-hour course. The course will contain 12, 5-minute lessons.
So, how much time should you budget to create this course? In my experience, you should budget 10 hours per five minute Captivate project. Some simple math means you should budget 120 hours to create the course (approximately 3 weeks). That timing includes:
- Recording the 12 lessons using Captivate
- Adding/editing Text Captions (where the text would be copied and pasted from a NotePad or Word file)
- Adding interactivity such as click boxes, buttons and/or text entry boxes and audio clips to a majority of the slides
- Adding approximately six Question Slides
- Publishing
- Posting
- Testing
- Fixing
- Republishing
- Reposting
- Retesting
The timing does not include:
- Script Writing
- Script Rehearsals
- Writing the Questions and Answers for the Question Slides
- Audio Recording
- Audio Cleanup
On average, I recommend you budget up to 20 hours for writing and developing a script to support the 1-hour course.
Of course, none of this timing takes 508 compliance into account. You could easily add 50% to your production costs/timing if such 508 compliant features such as closed captions are required.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Please let me know how long it’s taking you to produce your lessons. If possible, let me know the length of your typical lessons and give as much detail as you can. I’ll post responses in future newsletters.
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