When it comes to producing Captivate projects, I'm frequently asked: "How big is too big?" People who ask this question are referring to the physical size of the project, the number of slides and the .CP file size, not the size of the screen capture area.
There are three numbers to think about with every Captivate project: the size of the production file (name.cp) in megabytes, and the size of the published file (typically that's a .SWF file) in megabytes, and the number of slides in the finished project.
Should you be more concerned with the number of slides in a project, or the megabytes your project occupies on your hard drive? I'm not worried about either. I'm most concerned with the size of the resulting SWF file when you publish the project, in megabytes, and how long it will take a user to complete your lesson.
I've come across projects that are in excess of 250 slides. Wow, that's big! I think 250 slides in any one project is 100 slides too many. In truth, there isn't a limit to how big your Captivate project's can be. When it comes to project size, you're limited only by the size of your hard drive. However, projects with an excessive number of slides can result in any of the following problems:
- Slow PC performance
- Slow previewing (when you preview the project, all of the slides are generated and larger slide counts simply take longer to generate than lower slide counts)
- Increased chance of the project becoming corrupt
- Increased publishing time
- Increased upload time (especially when uploading content into an LMS)
Keep the following in mind when it comes to the size of your Published SWF's:
- A SWF will not play until 60% has been downloaded to your users' computer. Internet connections being equal (I know they're not, but let's pretend), it just makes sense that the smaller the final SWF, the faster the SWF download will be.
- Shorter lessons are better for busy adult learners. If your lesson take 15 minutes or less to complete, learners will be encouraged to take more lessons.
Here's how you can lower the size of your Published SWF:
- Keep audio use to a minimum (use it only if necessary)
- Keep Animation use to a minimum (I'm talking about importing SWFs and using unnecessary Fade In and Fade Out effects on images, captions and text entry areas)
- Set the slide quality to Standard if possible (Right-click a slide and choose Properties. Optimized, JPEG, or High Quality can increase file size.)
- Lower the Frames per second: Choose Project > Preferences > Preferences. The default Frames per second is 30, but lowering it to 20 typically works well and could save you significant SWF size)
What can result in Project Bloat?
- Unused Backgrounds
- Unused Audio
- Unused Animation
- Unused Images (Use the Library's Select Unused Items tool and delete anything not being used.)
What's an ideal slide count?
We try to keep our projects under 150 slides. 70-90 slides are ideal.
Want to learn more about Captivate? Click
here. Want to test drive some Captivate simulations? Click
here.
Recent Comments