No programming necessary!

The promise of multimedia presentation software
for creating quality learning objects

Web poster presentation by Eli Collins-Brown and Cheri Toledo
Illinois State University
Curriculum & Instruction

Troubleshooting

Because the initial results were very disappointing to us, Eli is in the process of doing some more work with Camtasia and Captivate. She decided to start with Camtasia.

Camtasia	Here's another try with Camtasia. I took the audio out of the powerpoint, left the timing and transitions in and recorded it. Then I imported the individual audio clips into Camtasia and manually put in transitions and matched the timing of the slides with the timing of the audio. I exported as a Flash file with a menu and set the size of the movie to 384x288 pixels, and the audio quality to 22.050kHz, Mono, 24kBits/sec. The final movie size was significantly smaller than the original 32 Mgs; only 14 Mgs. Still very large, too large for students on dial-up, but can be burned to a CD. Notice how much larger this file is with the audio added. Actually based on the next couple of movies I produced, this file size seems peculiarly large.
	Small Glycogen movie (opens in a new window, close to return to this page) 14 Mgs!
	The only problems I notice are that there is no controller bar (because I set it to 'Basic') and there's a glitch with the transitions. Back to the drawing board!
	This time: I took the transitions out of the PowerPoint but left the timing in for each slide. I imported the audio clips and manually placed on the timeline I inserted fade transitions between each slide I exported the Flash move with a size set to 640x480 pixels I kept the audio at 22.050kHz, Mono, 24kBits/sec I exported using the markers for the menu I set the controllers bar to Advanced so we get the 'slider' bar.
	Here's the result- Glycogen     8.4Mgs
	The result is better than the previous example. The file size is smaller, around 8.4 Mgs. This is interesting since I produced it with the larger display size. I needed to edit the menu titles before rendering the movie. The transitions do not show well at all.
	This time I tried creating smaller movies based on the markers that Camtasia created when it recorded the PowerPoint. Camtasia cuts the large movie into smaller movies using the markers as cut points: I took the transitions out of the PowerPoint but left the timing in for each slide. I imported the audio clips and manually placed on the timeline I inserted fade transitions between each slide I exported the Flash move with a size set to 640x480 pixels I kept the audio at 22.050kHz, Mono, 24kBits/sec I exported using the markers to create smaller movies I then created a web menu to link all of the smaller .swf files (or movies) This loads the smaller movies one at a time (all less than 1 Mg), may be easier for those on dial-up to see movies Creates LOTS of files
	Web Menu Glycogen Movie (each movie is less than 1 Mg)
	This is nice. There only seems to be one problem that I haven't figured out how to fix - the very last second of each movie captures the next PowerPoint slide so the transitions are not smooth at all. It's based on the markers that Camtasia created when it recorded the PowerPoint but I can't seem to manipulate them at all.

Time

I've spent about 12 hours just working with these three movies. Development time is always somewhat of an 'unknown' to professors. It also one of the issues that discourages them from trying to incorporate media into their web-based courses.

This web site was created for a conference presentation made in April, 2005.
Please contact the presenters will any questions.

©2005 Eli Collins-Brown and Cheri Toledo