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In the last few days I have been converting a few courses from Adobe Captivate 4 to Video and evaluating the slide quality that was being output. It suddenly occurred to me that developing courseware for use across multiple learning platforms (including mobile learning), requires the use of more image-based presentations and minimal use of text.

This idea might seem obvious, but it is not something I have thought about until now, and is going to completely change the way I develop courseware in the future.

I am the sort of person who likes to design a course once and be able to scale it up and down for the different platforms, without having to modify the courseware for each individual platform. This also means that any updates or modifications need only be made to the master file, and can be redistributed easily down the track.

Example 1 – Text Based Slides

My past courses were designed for 720×540 pixels, with some text-based slides for displaying lists of information.

The text can be easily seen when viewed on large formats.

However when you scale this down to mobile screens, text becomes difficult to read, and the screen space is effectively wasted.

Example 2  – Animated Slides

Animated slides and those using larger text fonts are still viewable down to mobile screen sizes.

Conclusion

When developing courseware that can be easily converted to various learning platforms, it is best to use image-based layouts with large fonts, rather than text-based layouts.

This allows for:-

• Easy resizing for multiple learning platforms, without any modifications for each individual platform.
• Easy update redistribution, with modifications only needed to the master file.

Captivate 4 can output AVI video, but in the past this has been a hit or miss approach for me due to the quirks of the various codecs.

Having some spare time, I decided to sit down and experiment with the different codecs to determine what works, and the options that can be used with Adobe Media Encoder to produce an acceptable final product on my Windows XP machine.

Test Courses

For this experiment I created two different sized courses.

Test Course 1 – with animation slide and font test slide, each with audio.

Test File 1:-

• Resolution: 720 x 540
• Run time: 2 minutes 58 seconds.
• Number of slides: 3
• Frames: 5343 (30fps)
• SWF Flash file size: 1.97MB

Test Course 2 – with text, image and animation slides, each with audio.

Test file 2:-

• Resolution: 720 x 540
• Run time: 7 minutes 16 seconds.
• Number of slides: 8
• Frames: 13083 (30fps)
• SWF Flash file size: 4.83 MB

Codecs

There are two important aspects to a video file:-

• The Container – The file type for transporting the video.
• The Codec – The Encoder/Decoder that tells the video player how to view the video.

Adobe Captivate 4 uses AVI files as the container.

The codecs available to Adobe Captivate 4 are dependent on the various video software packages installed on your machine. The available codecs can be seen if you select Publish in Captivate, choose Media in the left hand menu, and click the Video Format drop down.

My Windows XP machine contains the following video codecs:-

• Cinepak Codec by Radius
• Indeo video 5.10
• MJPEG Compressor
• DivX 6.0 Codec
• DV Video Encoder
• Pinnacle MPEG 2 Encoder
• WMVideo 9 Encoder DMO

I tried each of these codecs on the two test files to see the results.

Captivate Processing

It should be noted that it takes quite a bit of processing power to convert courses to AVI. Often you will find the SWF to AVI conversion will appear to stall at various points during rendering of the video, but this is just the program doing its thing. The larger the course, the more often it will appear to stall.

Table 1 – AVI file output sizes

Table 1 shows the output AVI videos file sizes produced when exporting AVI with the different codecs. The size varies with how well the codec compresses the video.

The Pinnacle MPEG 2 Encoder went through the rendering process but did not produce an output file. The Windows Media Video 9 encoder produced an error in Captivate, and the DivX encoder stalled in Captivate and did not finish.

Table 2- Media Player Results.

To check the quality of the AVI output files, I tried running them directly in Quicktime and Windows Media Player.

Quicktime was only able to display the AVI video for the MJPEG and DV Video Encoder, but in both cases the text was blurred or distorted.

Windows Media Player displayed acceptable video and audio for the Cinepak, MJPEG and Microsoft Video encoders. It could only play audio for the Indeo video, and the text was blurred on the DV Video Encoder.

I expect Windows Media Player has several more codec plug-ins installed than the Quicktime player, allowing it to decode the video files correctly.

Adobe Media Encoder Processing

For the following tests I imported the AVI files into Adobe Media Encoder and set the output size for 640×480 pixels, with a H.264 output format using the Youtube SD preset, and a FLV output format using the Web Large preset.

Table 3- Adobe Media Encoder Results

Each Testfile1 AVI was imported and output correctly for each codec, however the text for the DV Video output was distorted.

Adobe Media Encoder truncated all the AVI input files except the MJPEG Compressor, with only the first 2 slides imported from the AVI files.

The MJPEG compressor AVI file was the only one that was imported into Adobe Media Encoder correctly, and produced the correct output.

Conclusion

Due to the much smaller file sizes, SWF is the best option to use when supported.

For Youtube, Apple iPhone and other applications where Flash SWF is not supported, video can be created from non-interactive courses in Adobe Captivate.

The codec chosen for rendering the video determines:-

• The size of the resultant video file.
• The time to render the video.
• The compatibility with video players.
• The compatibility with other video converters such as Adobe Media Encoder.

On my Windows XP machine, the best workflow is to export the AVI file using MJPEG Compressor codec, input the resulting AVI file into Abode Media Encoder, and encode for H264 or FLV format. This resulting video can then be used on Youtube or other video platforms. This does come at a price with the AVI file being very large in size.

At present Adobe Captivate is only available for windows users, but a Mac version is coming soon. I hope that when it is released, the creative Mac community will be able to pressure Adobe to address the process of outputting courses to video in a friendly workflow for environments that do not support Flash.

I hope this has been helpful, and would be interested in hearing if anyone else has another workflow.

Other useful links:-

• Tips to Publish to AVI in Adobe Captivate
• Adobe Media encoder CS4 – File formats supported for import.
• Adobe in Technical communication and eLearning – a blog by Senior Adobe Product Evangelist RJ Jacquez
• The Adobe Captivate Blog

The two initial courses added are:

• XC001 – Intro to Radio Waves – An introduction to  radio waves and their characteristics.
• XC002 – Intro to Cellular – An introduction to cellular technologies and protocols.

The courses are provided in Flash and PDF format. Each course is supplemented with a set of PDF lesson notes.

Additional courses will be made available on this list regularly.

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