I hadn’t played with branching, so first I  Googled, and found the really cool example of branching with the Captivate image slideshow, which I hadn’t used either. The demo is available at http://blogs.adobe.com/educationleaders/2010/03/adobe_captivate_-_branching_sl.html

For my example, I played with a screen demo of a friend’s site,  TheMusicBook, an online music directory for musicians in Australia.

For the branching, I  decided to create a basic menu for some of the search options at The Music Book.

As the objective was to host the video at YouTube, although I could have used a 16:9 ratio (the latest ratio at YouTube), I just used the standard 4:3 ratio, for this narrow site. I recorded at 1024×768.

Things never go smoothly when recording demonstrations. Despite taking notes earlier in the day, I forgot to adjust the Captivate defaults before recording, so I had to go back afterwards and turn of mouse clicks, mouse display, and default durations.

Then on the last screen, I clicked outside the recording window, and Firefox crashed. Firefox tends to crash about once a week for me,  so that’s not unusual.

I added the extra screen for the menu buttons, created the branching by editing the buttons so that they would “go to”  the correct place in the demo, and return to the menu when the branch was complete.

Saved and published it as a SWF as usual. Tested it in the browser,   and the branching was nice, interactive, and working.

But the problem with YouTube is that it won’t accept SWF files for uploading. Even though Captivate can publish as AVI, my past experiments found the filesize was waaay too large.

So as per one of the suggestions from an old Adobe blog, I purchased SoThink’s SWF to AVI conversion program.

My first attempt at conversion lasted 2 seconds – there’s a default option in SoThink, that automatically finishes recording after the last slide, and for some odd reason with Captivate SWF files, it always thinks the first slide is the last slide.  So I turned off the setting and tried again.

This time it sat and did nothing after the first slide. I’m assuming this is because the interactive menu started on the second slide. So I ended up pretending to be an interactive visitor, and selected each of the menu options whilst playing and recording my Captivate demonstration, in SoThink. I’m not sure if this means that you can’t have an interactive video in YouTube, or to convert an interactive SWF into AVI. Whatever.

So now I had an AVI format movie. Time to upload it to YouTube.

I logged in, and started uploading. YouTube lets you edit the title and description while the upload is progressing in the background.  Strangely, as soon as I typed the word Captivate into the description tag, the upload ended with an error. No details, just an error.

Was it a format problem?   What the heck, let’s try it again.  I didn’t use the word Captivate in the description, and this time it uploaded successfully.

It’s not a great example – it’s just an adventure. And here it is:

The video used in this sample was captured from an 800px display, as any smaller than that would make navigating through xcart too annoying. The appearance is still pretty pathetic, which just reinforces the need for a voiceover. So I’ll add that later, and reupload the videos.

I guess we’ll let clients ask for the swf to be sent to them directly, at the original high quality resolution, and 800px width.

Just for fun, I’ll also embed the 425 version, to see how the quality differs.

Feedback so far is that the code provided by youtube makes it look clearer. So it must be extrapolating the larger screen size, making it blurry. Oh well.

But to upload them to YouTube, we had to convert them to .AVI files, as YouTube won’t let you upload .SWF files.

And then the actual encoding process used by YouTube is pathetically low quality, traditionally 320×240 pixels. Which makes everything so blurry that you can’t read the text.

I experimented with recording my training sessions at 640, 800 and 1024, to see if it made any difference. They were all still blurry.

YouTube has recently increased the quality slightly – up to 480×360, which is still pretty poor.
Initially you could only view the higher resolution versions of newish videos, by appending a parameter to the end of the address – &fmt=18. However they have now placed a link underneath videos that have the higher resolution version available, so that if you have a slower connection you can view the old 320px version, but with a high speed connection you can view the improved Beta version.

Still not really good enough for use in training though. For clients we will probably stick with hosting Flash videos through Adobe Connect, and avoid the double conversion process.

Or investigate other free video hosting solutions.