by Kevin Siegel 
I received an email last week from a Captivate developer who was concerned with how long it was taking for a published lesson to begin playing for his learners. The lesson wasn't all that big and wasn't that long (both things can lead to lesson bloat and increase how long it takes for a lesson to begin to play). He also verified that his web server wasn't the issue. In fact, lessons created by other Captivate developers in his company downloaded faster than his.
Once he told me that other content loaded with decent speed, I had a likely culprit: the Preloader and/or the Preloader percentage. I helped him tweak both, and he reported that his lesson is loading much faster.
Of course, if one Captivate developer can overlook the role of the Preloader, it's possible others have as well. So read on folks and let's delve into Preloaders and how to control them.
What's a Preloader?
When a learner clicks the link to start an eLearning lesson, the lesson will rarely begin playing right away. Why? A specific percentage of the lesson needs to download before the lesson will play. The time it takes for that percentage to be reached depends on a few things: the size of the lesson, the speed of the learner's internet connection, and the capacity of the server to send the data to the learner (bandwidth).
Captivate's Preloader feature allows you to both control what the learner sees as they wait for the lesson to begin playing, and the percentage of the lesson that must be downloaded before the lesson will begin to play.
Captivate ships with a few Preloaders you can use when you publish your lesson. However, many of my corporate customers prefer to brand the lesson and use their corporate logos as the Preloader. You can accomplish the task easily enough. First, with a project open, display Captivate's Preferences (Edit > Preferences for Windows users; Adobe Captivate > Preferences for Macintosh users). Then select the Start and End category from the Project group.
To load your corporate logo and use it as a Preloader, click the Browse button to the right of Preloader. Find and open your logo. You can use any of the following formats as a Preloader: jpeg, gif, bmp, wmf, or swf.
To control how much of the lesson must be downloaded before it will begin to play, change the Preloader % value. The higher the Preloader percentage, the longer the learner will have to wait before seeing the lesson. If you set the Preloader % lower, the lesson will play sooner. However, since little of the lesson will have been received by the learner, the lesson with sputter along instead of playing smoothly. If you set the percentage too high, the learner will have to wait for the lesson to begin playing at all. A best practice would be to set the Preloader somewhere in the middle. I typically set my Preloader % to 50, which tends to work quite well.
Once you publish your lesson, the Preloader image will appear for your learners until the Preloader % is reached.
Captivate's Preloader feature allows you to both control what the learner sees as they wait for the lesson to begin playing, and the percentage of the lesson that must be downloaded before the lesson will begin to play.
Captivate ships with a few Preloaders you can use when you publish your lesson. However, many of my corporate customers prefer to brand the lesson and use their corporate logos as the Preloader. You can accomplish the task easily enough. First, with a project open, display Captivate's Preferences (Edit > Preferences for Windows users; Adobe Captivate > Preferences for Macintosh users). Then select the Start and End category from the Project group.
To load your corporate logo and use it as a Preloader, click the Browse button to the right of Preloader. Find and open your logo. You can use any of the following formats as a Preloader: jpeg, gif, bmp, wmf, or swf.
To control how much of the lesson must be downloaded before it will begin to play, change the Preloader % value. The higher the Preloader percentage, the longer the learner will have to wait before seeing the lesson. If you set the Preloader % lower, the lesson will play sooner. However, since little of the lesson will have been received by the learner, the lesson with sputter along instead of playing smoothly. If you set the percentage too high, the learner will have to wait for the lesson to begin playing at all. A best practice would be to set the Preloader somewhere in the middle. I typically set my Preloader % to 50, which tends to work quite well.
Once you publish your lesson, the Preloader image will appear for your learners until the Preloader % is reached.
If you'd like to see a demonstration on adding a preloader to a Captivate project, check out the video I created on IconLogic's YouTube channel.
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