1. Apply Vocal Enhancer: Default effect.

2. Normalize process

3. Apply Reduce Noise process:
– Reduction: 25%
– Reduce by: 15%

4. Apply Compressor: For Voice: Subtle
5. Apply EQ Graphic: Bass Management:
– Low: 0
– Low-Mid: -3
– High-Mid: 0
– High: 8
6. Apply *another* EQ Graphic effect, just like above, only this time with the High setting back at 0.

What I found was that I had to always click ‘apply’ for effects before moving on to the next one. In other words, don’t get cute and just load up the ‘effect stack’ and then apply them all – in my case it didn’t sound good if I did it that way.

Unfortunately, Soundbooth does not offer a ‘batch processing’ feature for these effects, so for the 27 or so wav files I had I had to do each individually, which took some time.

Lastly, once I did the above for each of the wav files, I then used Soundbooth’s “Volume Match” batch feature to match the volume of all of the tracks of the first wav file in the group.

The result is not a perfectly clean set of audio and it’s definitely not ‘pro’ level but it’s a heck of a lot better than the source wav files were.

Keep in mind also that the EQ and Compression settings will probably need to be tweaked depending on the type of voice(s) audio you have. In this case, the majority of the voiceover audio was a female with a medium to upper-medium, sorta ‘nasally’ vocal sound. These settings took the ‘nasaly’ out and definitely helped.

Do you have a preferred set of audio processing steps? Also – I’d prefer to just do everything in Audacity. Any plugins that you have found that do a good job cleaning up voiceover audio? What I’ve found is that ’stock’ effects intended to do this just don’t help much or make it worse. Like Soundbooth’s ‘Vocal Enhancer’ – it’s not very good by itself, in my opinion. I’m amazed that there isn’t a simple tool built to do this. But I guess with everyone’s voices sounding different it’s impossible to get right.

After implementing the fullscreen feature, I’m thrilled. I’m convinced that every elearning app like this should include it as a feature. And I wondered why I hadn’t seen it used before…so I thought, “Perhaps SCORM/AICC calls can’t be made when it is in fullscreen mode?” While I haven’t taken the time to actually test that theory, I did put together a quick html/swf to test whether the ExternalInterface class is usable when the swf is in fullscreen mode. And it works! Here is the example (warning – it opens in a new window). To test for yourself, first put it in fullscreen by clicking the button (it’s a toggle). Then, click the ‘Call ExternalInterface’ button to call a simple function in the html page named ’showAlert’, which shows an alert box.

So, here’s the code:

In Flash:

/*************************
* External Interface – work in fullscreen mode? YES!
*************************/
function checkInterface(e:MouseEvent):void
{
if (ExternalInterface.available)
{
status_txt.text=”ExternalInterface available!”;
ExternalInterface.call(”showAlert”, “It works!”);
}
else
{
status_txt.text=”ExternalInterface Unavailable!”;
}
}
myButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, checkInterface);

// fullscreen
function goFullScreen():void
{
if (stage.displayState==StageDisplayState.NORMAL)
{
stage.displayState=StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN;
}
else
{
stage.displayState=StageDisplayState.NORMAL;
}
}
fullscreenBtn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, _handleClick);

function _handleClick(event:MouseEvent):void
{
goFullScreen();
}

——————————–

Function I added to the html page published from Flash (with ‘allowFullscreen’ param set to true):

function showAlert(text)
{
alert(text);
}

So, theoretically, going fullscreen shouldn’t cause any issues with communications with an LMS. As you noticed if you tried the example, calling the showAlert function in the html page forces the swf out of fullscreen mode. I’m assuming (too many assumptions here?) that this won’t happen for behind-the-scenes calls.

Have you tried this? What has your experience with using fullscreen flash for your elearning?

http://elearninglive.com/wordpress/tutorials/

Hopefully, they will be of some use to others. I, admittedly, need some way of pushing myself towards learning more about ActionScript 3 and I figured this would be a great way to do it. So, somewhat selfishly, the tutorials are really about my own learning : ) That said, I would think that some folks new to Flash/ActionScript would get some value out them. I’m specifically targeting someone like myself about 5 years back – having jumped into the elearning development role with absolutely zero development experience, with the exception of a couple of intro to programming courses in C which were horrible.

The first tutorial offered is titled, “Creating a Drag and Drop Learning Interaction Using ActionScript 3.0″. In actuality, the focus isn’t on AS3 in terms of the OOP aspect, as this tutorial’s code resides in a single frame on the timeline.

I do plan on following up this simple drag and drop tutorial with a dynamic, XML-based version as that is always a better way to go. Before that, I expect to add a tutorial on some of the real basics – how to create a simple button that controls the timeline, for example. But *all* with an elearning focus, with practical examples. To my knowledge there is nothing of its kind out there presently (not for free!) that has the beginning instructional/elearning developer in mind.

My inspiration for this endeavor is Lee Brimelow’s excellent (and that’s an understatement) tutorials at gotoandlearn.com. Lee started his tutorials a number of years ago before he was hired by Adobe and they have always been top-notch. The first tutorial’s audio is horrible (this logitech headset’s mic is really ‘creaky’), and I should have spent more time polishing it, but what the heck.

PLEASE provide feedback on the tutorials. What you liked, what you didn’t, whether they were valuable to you. Right now I need to redo the way I’m delivering this/these videos as the current cheesy-looking html page that is serving them (adsense and all…I could use the dough) is awkward. After I get a decent number of these videos online I’ll re-think the approach to make it look/work better.

Anyways…enjoy! I hope people learn from these things. I know I will. All my tutorials will come with downloadable source. No licensing – they are free to use in any way you wish. Hopefully someone will come along and improve on them and send me the improvements so that I can post and we all gain from the experience of sharing.

Here is a screenshot of one:

Transparent Captions Still Result in Fuzzy Text

UPDATE: The screenshots in this article were taken with Snagit. The .gif output of the image above results in the black text above looking much sharper than the white/blue image below, but trust me when I say that in reality the white/blue looks much better!

(There are workarounds for this problem. The most popular one seems to be to highlight the text using the background color. This particular page says you only need to highlight one character with a gray highlight color, but I tried it and all I got was a single character with a gray highlight : (

Since I wanted to get away from the plain white background and go with a blue background (closer to what the client had originally provided me), I wound up doing the highlight workaround and using the same color as the background color for the highlight. But this is a real pain because every single piece of text has to be highlighted. The result is not crystal clear when loading into a flash-wrapper (as usual), but it’s still way better and is acceptable:

You can't tell, but the text is highlighted with the same blue as the background!

I’m kinda thinking that a better way to go about this is to simply create a custom caption and just using that. I’ll give it a try and post the .bmp files for it. It’ll be a snap to simply change the color of the .bmp files so they’ll be reusable. And the result should be much easier and better than having to go through every line of text and adding highlights to it. Ridiculous!

Published SWF Files

Filesize Comparison

Summary

To my ears, the encoding speed set to 0 sounds the best. And amazingly, it yields the lowest filesize. So far, it seems that a setting of 48-44-0 is the best for voiceover-based Captivate movies. I’ll do some further testing this time will large, real movies that contain slide data and a lot of audio (including some music), for the next post.

Comparison Details

While I’m no scientist, I think I adhered to a logical way of approaching this. I of course used the same machine to publish each clip, I used the same exact .cp file for each file (I simply went into the Publish window’s Audio settings and decreased the encoding bitrate, then double-clicked on the single text caption in the movie (residing on the first slide (of two) and set to display throughout project), and then published.

For the audio file, I used the same audio clip that I got from a public domain audio book website. I simply downloaded the full clip, in .ogg format, from the page above and then opened in Audacity to export the first 8 to 10 seconds of it. I exported to .wav format. I of course used the same exact audio file for each published output (again – I used the same exact .cp file repeatedly for each test).

Here are the results for you to compare with your ears:

And, the file sizes:

Captivate Audio Settings File Size Comparison

No, the 16 and 24 bit version filesizes being higher than the higher-quality ones is not a typo. At first I was so surprised that I went and re-checked and re-published. So basically from what I can see there is no point in ever going below 32kbps as you’re gaining filesize and losing quality.

Where I’ll Go From Here

Obviously encoding bitrate is just one of the 3 parameters that can be configured, with the other two being encoding frequency and encoding speed. I will be following this post with some new tests that compare those settings. Eventually, I hope to compile a definitive table and a final recommendation for exactly what settings in Captivate deliver the absolute best ‘value’ in terms of filesize-to-quality ratio. Keep in mind that I am concerned strictly with voiceover audio. I would assume that is what anyone else would care about when it comes to Captivate as well.

Please leave a comment if you have suggestions, or know of an unbiased, definitive comparison that perhaps I missed in my search, or if you have any tips for how I should approach the next batch of tests.

UPDATE: I’ve continued on with the testing. Here is a link to Part Two.