Adobe Captivate 4: Ready to Drop Some Megabytes?

by Kevin A. Siegel 

I recently had a student attend my Upgrading from Adobe Captivate 3 to 4 class who was concerned about two things: would her version 3 project upgrade to version 4 without incident; and was there anything I could do to make her project smaller (in megabytes).

First a bit of background information: this Captivate developer's version 3 project contained just 30 slides. A few of the slides contained  audio, most didn't. If I had closed my eyes and guessed what a project matching this description weighed (in megabytes), I would have guessed 5 or 10mb. In reality, the project weighed in at a whopping 300mb. No fooling... 300mb.

So back to the two questions at hand: would the project upgrade and would it get smaller? The answer to both questions was a resounding yes, but there were mixed results until I showed her a tried and true method for downsizing a project.

First, the upgrade process is simple. Choose File > Open in Captivate 4 and open the version 3 project. Captivate 4 will take care of the upgrade automatically (it may take some time if the project is large). During the upgrade process, the project in question magically shed some pounds... dropping from 300mb to 250mb. Poof! Just like that, 50 megabytes were gone.

Happy as we both were with that result, the file (now at 250mb), was still too bloated for its own good.

We took a look at her library... surely there would be hundreds of unused assets hiding there that, once removed, would lower her project size down to a respectable level. Unfortunately, the library had absolutely no unused assets.

Never one to give up, we tried this last ditch technique:

1. We created a new, blank project that was the same width and height of the bloated project (640x480).
   
   
2. We chose File > Import > Slides/Objects and imported all of the assets from the bloated project into the new project.
   
   
3. We saved the new project and closed it.

 

I bet you're wondering if that made any sort of difference at all. Well yes... the file size dropped from 250mb down to 249mb. Nice! I know, I know... you're impressed. Um, wait a minute... you do realize I'm messing with you, right? In reality, the file size dropped from 250mb to 7mb. No fooling, no exaggerating... 7mb.

Just to see if this was some kind of illusion, the same developer produced another Captivate 3 project, this one 150mb. We ran the some steps as before (upgrading and then importing the assets into a new, blank project) with similar results: the project size dropped to 6mb.

Got a bloated project? Go ahead and give this technique a whirl. Please let me know what happens on your end (I'd be curious to see how small the project becomes).

Note: Prior to updating your projects from Captivate 3 to Captivate 4, make backups. Once the update process is complete, you cannot open the updated version 4 projects in Captivate 3.

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Comments

[Kim Conrad]

I have attempted this a couple of times. While it does reduce the size, it moves all of my "hotspots". Am I doing something wrong?

[JFDragon]

You're right... that's work well... with any project without questions. I've tried something like that and Cp4 don't take all the questions in my quiz.

So I have decide to use Cp3 for the project I just finish and will be happy to start the new ones on Cp4.

But if somebody have an idea, I will be happy to try them.

P.S.: I just receave you books on Cp4 and it's a great job!!