I did a video in the spring of 2008 that was 409 slides with
no audio inserted. Once I published the project, the video was
utilizing almost 100% of my single core CPU resources. The only
solution I found was to split the video into sections, and make
them in the 100 slide range. The splitting actually worked well for
my situation because the SME on the project had actually put
sections in the video as we created the project, so splitting it
out was pretty easy.
The four videos I came away with now use only about 25% of
the CPU resources on a single core CPU. This CPU usage is cut in
half as you double your CPU cores (duo core is approx. 12.5%, and
quad core is approx. 6%).
Our videos are mainly viewed in a Citrix environment, so each
person viewing a video uses those resource percentages on the
Citrix server. If two people are viewing one video simultaneously,
then the CPU usage percentages double.
Once you start getting much above 100 slides, the CPU usage
begins to climb significantly.
My videos are unique in that they are approximately 1000 X
700 pixels in screen size at the highest resolution available (my
boss's wishes), so the videos are kind of primed to use a lot of
resources out of the gate. But at 100 slide range, the resource
usage in very acceptable.
One Important note: This only occurred on this one video we
captured, and it was captured from an executable application. I
have done other large videos (not as big as 400 slides) which were
captured from web-based applications, and we did not experience any
CPU resource increase at all. I cannot explain this other than
maybe the web environment provided captures that were not loaded
with data packets. Who really knows on that one.
Captivate comes with a Menu Builder feature. Our company
opted to simply use a hyperlink menu from our intranet page to
launch any videos.
Don't forget when you publish as a flash video to make sure
all of the published files for a video are in the same folder where
the flash file is stored.
I hope this is helpful.
Rick Legg