I Googled my head off for help with this last night and couldn’t come up with anything, so I thought I’d put this out there for those of you who want to put your head through your monitor because Captivate is driving you insane.
Yesterday I was editing a recording I made in Adobe Captivate 2. It was only 18 frames, about 7 minutes long, and is a demo of a system we use at work. Should have been a slam dunk.
The Problem
For the most part, everything went fine until I published the file to SWF with HTML. But when I played back the published file, at about the 5th frame, the audio gained a very pronounced echo which lasted a couple frames, and then left the rest of the audio sounding like it was in a tin can.
I figured, “hmm… must be a glitch,” so I published it again. Same thing, but this time the problems happened on different frames.
I tried publishing again after changing a couple publishing settings: same effect – screwed up audio on different frames. Each time I published (about 8 times total) the audio was screwed up in a different way, and I never edited the file between publishes.
Needless to say I was a bit frustrated.
The Solution
I tossed out a rather annoyed email to a co-worker, who responded this morning with the answer (and it’s at this point that I have to say to her again: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!).
Apparently she had run across the problem before. I don’t know how she figured it out, but the answer is to adjust the slide timing slightly using the Audio > Edit Timing… feature.
The Edit Audio Timing window lets you grab a slider indicating the start time for an effect or frame change. Grab any one of those sliders and move it slightly (my suggestion is to be more zoomed in than shown here so you really are only moving it slightly). Click OK, then republish and everything comes out fine.
One thing you might want to do is verify that none of the timing of objects on your slides changed. It could happen, so make sure you check.
Why this works is a mystery to me, but there you have it. Hope it helps someone.
[UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Ericka, below, here are a few more tips for things that might help in similar situations.]
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THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
I’m a first-time user of Captivate, and the audio editing is driving me nuts! Very frustrating piece of crap. 30 hrs to produce 5 min. of video… sigh…
I had this mysterious echo suddenly appear in a couple of my projects. Your wonderful tip saved me. Talk about timely!
Thanks for going to all the trouble of illustrating the solution.
If you’re into genealogy, you can have a free copy of any software on our Web site. Just email me (the “caddicks.com” has been cleared on SpamArrest).
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Glad it helped. It certainly drove me insane.
Thanks for the software offer! I haven’t done much in the way of genealogy, but it does interest me, and I have a family member that’s into it.
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I tried following your suggestion and it didn’t work. I was able to fix a couple of slides just by removing them and reinserting them. But now I’m really stuck. I tried moving the red Slide 17″ line just a litte (and I maximized the screen) but it didn’t help. I still have that same horribly annoying echo. Can you think of anything else for me to try.
Thanks
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Hi Debbie.
Is the echo across your entire movie, or random, as happened to me?
If it’s the entire movie, I’d say it’s your audio settings. Set them to publish at CD quality and see if that helps.
If it’s random and the trick above doesn’t help… not sure what to do. I’m usually pretty good at troubleshooting this kind of thing and this one had me stymied until my co-worker gave the answer that she just stumbled on herself.
Maybe just as a test, try moving the slide line further and see if that helps.
Since reinsertion seemed to help with other slides, would it help to cut and paste your entire slide set out and back in again (I’d do a “Save As” before trying that one)?
Sorry I’m not more help on this one. Good luck. If you get it fixed, please come back and post what worked for you.
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Thank you!!!!
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Ericka: You’re welcome!!!!
Thanks for stopping by, and for letting me know it was helpful.
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So, that fixed the issue, but then I noticed all of the closed captions went away… any ideas how to bring them back without re-creating them all? or thoughts on another possible work around?
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Sorry, not a clue.
Best I can do is point you to some more official support options.
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Thanks for the follow-up, after much searching I found another tip that in the future may save me from re-doing all the captions, instead just one slide (in the website linked from my name above). Thanks again!!!
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hey jeff, was wondering…
im importing mp3 voice-overs into captivate. and on some computers, the voice-overs sound fine. but on others, the voice-overs are slow.
do you know why this happens?
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Hey, Joey. Sorry for the delayed response here. No, I’m not sure why it would sound different on different computers. The only thing I could think of would be that there are different versions of Flash on each computer and that’s somehow affecting it (I’m assuming you’re talking about the playback after publishing). I’m not sure why that might be an issue, but it’s the only thing that comes to mind.
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I had a problem with audio where I was using 9 audio files during the movie. When i published it all of the audio jumped around so that the wrong audio was playing other the wrong slides. The solution you published on here worked for me too.
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Jeff says:
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:58 am
Wow, that’s a new one… glad this helped! Thanks for letting us know.
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[...] Fixing published audio problems in Captivate 2 [...]
Thanks so much, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what was buggering up my sound, everything looked fine, but now it’s all good!
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