Exports are ENTIRELY too large.

Question

I've recorded a short (5 minute) demo, and have attempted to
"publish" it using the LOWEST settings possible. I've got all
compression turned on, BMPs at 8 bit, etc.
When I export the file, I STILL have 20 megs of video and
require 69kbps to view it. This is completely unacceptable. I could
have done better than this with full-motion video and the windows
media 9 codec in an AVI. The whole point of using Captivate was to
create training videos we could stream online.
I noticed that captivate's "backgrounds" of the slides were
being stored in BMPs, and that there was no method within captivate
for checking to see if two backgrounds were identical. I started
exporting the BMPs, converting them to JPGs, and then importing
them back into captivate, and setting them as the backgrounds.
After a lot of wasted effort, I saw that Captivate was converting
them BACK into BMPs.
NOW I'm exporting each BMP for each slide, converting it to
JPG, importing it into the library, setting it as an "object" in
the scene, then ordering it with "send to back" to emulate the
background. Also, I'm looking for duplicate slides to delete
duplicates.
Honestly, I'm finding that this would have been 100x easier
to have manually put together in Flash. Has anyone else run into
these problems, and found a way to actually use Captivate the way
they claim it can be used? 20 megs for 4:47 is ridiculous.
-Javin

Answer 1

> The BMP backgrounds are over 320 megs.
Sounds like these are not files that were captured by
Captivate, hence they
are uncompressed bitmaps.
> After compression, that means the BMP
> backgrounds are still 15 megs, assuming the audio/video
aren't compressed
> at
> all. I can compress the BMPs to about 5 megs by making
them JPGs.
If you imported these bitmaps, then - for your next project,
not this one
:-) - I'd suggest some quick tests to the effect of:-
1 - try loss-less compression on the bitmaps. RLE is pretty
good. But most
likely if this makes no sense to you then you may not have
the tools to try
this ... :-/
2 - Try saving your bitmaps as PNG instead of BMP. By
default, no
compression of any sort is applied to bitmaps, but PNG should
be able to
save as a similar size to an RLE-compressed bitmap.
3 - And try Gif format files too.
Lastly - should have asked this first - what exactly are your
bitmaps? If
they are fairly flat colours - like screen grabs, where there
are large
elements of the same colour - then the above should be
effective. If, on the
other hand, they are photographic images - people, trees,
flowers where
there is a lot of colour and detail - then maybe the above
won't help.
Steve
Adobe Community Expert: eLearning, Mobile and Devices
European eLearning Summit - EeLS
Adobe-sponsored eLearning conference.
http://www.elearningsummit.eu