This is where we start to get a little technical. I'll try to keep it light. Think about the final product. In this instance we know that we want to have a quiz at the end. That means that the final product must necessarily be a Flash-based product (eith MP4 or SWF). These are the flash outputs. MP4 is the most common Flash type. SWF, or Shockwave File is like MP4's little brother, not nearly as strong or robust. MP4 is a good bet for live action video and lots of motion content. Shockwave is good for slow motion. Now, think about our content here, we have PowerPoint slides, audio, close captioning etc. What we don't have is a lot of motion. This means that I can cheat and go for a really low number for Frames Per Second (FPS). Most TV is 30 FPS (but really it is like 29.97 FPS).
But in our situation, if we have 7 FPS in terms of video, that would be plenty to deal with our lack of action. That just happens to be the rate that Shockwave likes.
This had to happen like this because we want to have the quiz feature at the end of the production. If we didn't care about that, then we could have considered some other formats like Windows Media and QuickTime (.mov). These are good alternatives to consider when you are making those trade-offs between quality and file size. Windows Media gives you a somewhat lower quality (in terms of resolution) production, but the file size is also really low. QuickTime gives you a much higher quality but the size of the file is also much higher. So consider all of this, and remember, as long as you still have your project, you can try out different presentation media without any additional effort. Want to see what it looks like in QuickTime? Just "Produce" (render) the project in the dot-MOV format. After it is done, go back to the project and try rendering it in WMV or Windows Media. Compare and contrast to tweak the variables to give yourself the presentation you want.
But for our project, we are targeting Shockwave. This creates an additional opportunity for us. The Flash formats allow you to create a Table Of Contents (TOC). This is a really good feature because it allows the user to jump from one section to another. In this instance, since we used the PowerPoint plug-in to record our initial video, Camtasia has actually created "Markers" for us that will eventually become our TOC when we render the project. But those markers are probably going to be generic like this one. In this example, I'm mousing over the green diamond to reveal that the Marker Name is "Slide 2".
Either double-click on the green diamond or rt-click and choose "Set Marker Name". I like to have the marker name match the title of the slide. Be reasonable on this though. If the title of the slide is 114 characters in length, you are going to want to trim that down to some reasonable number. In the final product the markers will turn into the TOC, which you can see in the red border in the image below. We'll have a chance to do a little clean-up work on this right before we render it, so don't spend more than 5 minutes on this now.
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