Don’t let low bandwidth stop you from wearing that genious hat!!
You make a nice captivate movie with all jazz and background audio. And there pops up a hidden glitch – end users of your captivate movie are short on bandwidth. But you, Mr. genious knows it pretty well that you have pre-loaders in Captivate to your rescue. So you go ahead and set the pre-loader percentage to 10%. This would mean that the movie will start playing when 10% of the content has loaded, with the remaining content loading as the movie plays. Wow!! You punch the air and all that….
Next day you get your users complaining that your preloader ‘rocket science’ is not working at all. The movie content loads 100% before starting regardless of preloader setting. Amused?? What did you do wrong?? Confused??...well this post will help you.
your problem is...
Your movie has background audio across the movie. Ideally, as soon as the movie is loaded(after 10% preloading), the content should start playing. But to play the first slide, the associated audio is needed and since there is only one big audio file, Captivate attempts to load the entire audio file(irrespective of the slides) prior to play the content. And this eats up the bandwidth.
....and the solution is....
Inside Captivate, for each slide start the audio after 0.1 second. This prevents the audio to be stiched as one huge audio file in the final output. Consequently this would prevent the need to load the entire audio when you don’t intend to do so. And your content will start playing flawlessly with audio once 10% of the entire content is loaded (assuming that you set pre-loader=10%). Rest of the content loads in background.
So with this solution you could once again wear that genious hat. WOW!!
Comments
you think background audio is a good for e-learning? It's a distractor.
If you just used voice narration - one per slide) you would not have one large audio file would you - or does cap assemble all audio into one file regardless if separate or not?
Posted by: kevin kissack | May 31, 2009 3:46 PM
Hi Kevin,
If every slide has audio inserted and there is no time lag between two audio clips (e.g. audio on slide1 ends at the end of slide1 and audio on slide2 begins as soon as slide2 is displayed), then Captivate assembles these audio files into one single audio file.
To avoid this behavior, you can give a very small (may be 0.1 secs) lag before starting the next audio clip.
Regards,
Mukul
Posted by: Mukul Lele | June 8, 2009 1:29 PM
can you move to slide to end just after the audio, so that it will break the audio up.
It seems counter productive to preload the video but have to load the all the audio, adobe need to address this problem. Especially when captivate is an $800 piece of software.
But, thanks for your help, hopefully this will solve my problem.
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