Publishing Adobe Captivate Videos on YouTube

The easiest way to do this is to use Adobe Captivate 4 and a video processing application such as Virtual dub. Adobe Captivate 4 will publish your projects as AVI files, which is a marked improvement on previous versions.
However the AVI files produced from captivate are huge - uploading them to YouTube can take several hours unless you have a hardcore Internet connection.
Also, the quality of these when viewed on YouTube can be very poor. YouTube re masters the videos uploaded to it, to save its hard drive space if you give it a large video file, it will re master it. And sometimes, not do a good job at all.
The best way to stop your videos being massacred as much is to remaster the video yourself - reduce the file size as much as possible and set the video resolution.

To remaster your Captivate AVI, you can use a program like Virtual dub.

I found that resizing the video to 640 x 480, compressing the audio, and recompressing the video vastly improved the results on YouTube.
To give you an idea of file size difference, a raw AVI file I produced in captivate (at 1280 x 1024 res) weighed in at 3.5GB.
After processing in Virtual dub, the file size was 152MB. Even taking into account the resized version had as many pixels, its a huge saving.
To test, I uploaded the original version and the virtual dubbed version to YouTube. I tried this with several videos. The original video had missing frames and artefacts; the processed version was much clearer, with no missing frames and minimal artefacts.

Recommended settings for Virtual dub remastering

• Resize video to 640 x 480
• Set the video compression to Cinepack Codec by Radius (you may have better Codec installed)
• Set audio to Full Processing Mode
• Set audio compression to MPEG Layer 3, 64KB/s, 44.100KHz, Mono

Sharp Virtual Dubbed video on YouTube

Simple guide to using Virtual dub to remaster your video

a) Load your AVI video into Virtual dub.
b) Resize video to 640 x 480 pixels.
This is done by selecting Video > Filters > Add > Resize.
In the resize dialog box, set the new video size to absolute, 640 x 480.

Resize filter in Virtual Dub

c) Set the video compression to Cinepack Codec by Radius (this is an old and creaky Codec others may work better!)
This is done by selecting Video > Compression > Cinepack Codec by Radius

Select a video Codec

d) Set audio to MPEG Layer 3, 64KB/s, 44.100 KHz, Mono
This is done by selecting Audio > Full Processing Mode. Then, select Compression > MPEG Layer 3 > 64KB/s, 44.100 KHz, Mono

Audio set at 64kbit/s, 44k, mono

With this all done, just hit save. You can then check your video before uploading to YouTube.