Known Participant

Question

Audio gets cut off at start and end of slide. Gets worse as project size increases.

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
October 23, 2010
7 replies
21105 views

Hi,

I am using Captivate 5 to create some e-learning content that is a mixture of slides with animated images on them and application/video demonstrations.

Each slide generally has several text captions which follow each other with a seperate piece of Audio, recorded iin Captivate 5. Each project generally has between 10 and 120 slides in it - The projects with a higher number of slides are mainly due to several frames of 'video'/recorded content.

The problem I am seeing is that audio cuts off, sometimes at the beginning, but more often, at the end of a slide and this behavior is more obvious when the project gets larger.

Interestingly, the problem seems to be much more prominent when viewing the published project by running the .swf file directly compared to when the .swf file is run via the.htm file !?! When running from the .htm file the problem is far less extreme/noticeable. I do not see the problem when previewing within Captivate.

I am aware of the various workarounds (to add gaps in the audio at the end of slides) but these are exactly that, workarounds - and very timeconsuming workarounds at that!

Is Adobe looking into why audio and video get out of sync as several customers have reported? Can we expect a fix? These flaws in the product significantly detract from the otherwise very good product that it is.

Cheers,

David

Audio and video

This topic has been closed for replies.

scambot

Participating Frequently

I'm experiencing this issue too. Audio is getting cut-off at the end of some slides. I'm using version 5.5.

If this has been ann issue for over two years and several versions of Captivate, why isn't anyone from Adobe chiming in here and helping us out?

RodWard

Community Expert

Please see my post (66) above. The solution is NOT to have perfect silence at the end of your audio clips.

I agree that this issue should ideally be resolved. We'll have to see if it still exists in Captivate 6.

K

kchandler7436795

Known Participant

Hi there,

I have been experiencing this problem and resolved it.

I record a narration on each slide and found some of the audio was clipped off at the end of slides. Specially when adjusting the volume settings.

Open the Audio Edit and select Project. Then click the slide button to move along the slides till you find the slide where audio has been clipped. I found that the audio at the end of the slide encroaches over onto the beginning of the next slide. To fix cut the encroaching audio and paste it into its correct place on the previous slide, then add a little silence at the end. You may have to adjust the timing on a slide so you can add the cut segment.

Works a treat for me.

Hope this helps.

Ken

A

Anonymous

I experienced audio clipping in Captivate 3 and continue to experience it in Captivate 5 (version 5.0.3.631). At the beginning of some slides, the audio skips a second or two of dialog. The problem occurs on all projects. The problem does not occur on every slide and does not seem to re-occur on playback. I have not determined if there is an association between quiz questions and the problem. I've receive numerous comments on this problem from my customers. My audio files are set to play 1 to 1.5 seconds after the beginning of their respective slides. I installed the "AudioOptions.ini" file, changed Slide Exit actions to "No Action", and force re-publish all slides.

ShanieM

Known Participant

It doesn't seem to have anything to do with quizzes or other objects. As a work-around, you can go to each slide and "shake" the audio track back and forth in the timeline. You will see the ends jump into place on the ones that are getting cut off. (Look at the ends of previous slides, not the beginnings).

But yes, this is a BIG problem.

A

Anonymous

I can confirm that this audio clipping problem still exists in Captivate 5.5. We've wasted literally dozens of hours and many dollars trying to work around these issues, including updgrading to 5.5 from 5.0. It's pretty much a joke right, since we're now behind on our deliverables. The audio at the end of some slides becomes clipped by about 1 second. We've tried moving the audio to a slightly later start time, but that usually doesn't work, and sometimes makes it worse. The ini and slide transition solutions also do not work.

The best solution we've found so far is to add silence in at the end of each slide, so that it clips off that instead. Although, in a sad twist of fate, the add silence feature in the editor doesn't work, and captivate automatically clips silence off at the end of many of our slides, even if we save the silence in (i.e. it will appear in the editor and then disappear after we save it and exit the editor, it never appears in the slide). So we're working on adding a small click noise at the end of each slide or having the noise be "white noise". Maybe that will work.

I'm not an expert by any means, but it seems like the audio sometime starts a second later in the preview pane, and plays past the alotted time. Maybe something similar is happening in the publishing process, except that Captivate abruptly ends audio play back when the audio segment is supposed to end.

ShanieM

Known Participant

Long time no update. Has anyone tried Cap 5.5 to see if this problem is resolved?

This issue kills my time lines!

A

Anonymous

Hi there,

If you are still facing Audio cut issues with Captivate even after following the below blog then please write to me at ashwin at adobe dot com. I will be happy to help you on the same

Blog link :http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2011/02/fix-for-audio-cut-issue-in-captivate-5.html

Thanks,

Ashwin Bharghav B

Adobe Captivate Team

G

GunBroker

Participant

Ashwin,

The patch you list in the blog post "http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2011/02/fix-for-audio-cut-issue-in-captivate-5.html" is a patch for Captivate 5.0. Is there a patch for 5.5?

We have been using a licensed version of Captivate since 2008 (version 3), We upgraded to 5.5 in December 2011, and still experience this audio clipping problem. It's to the point where managment is ready to switch us to another authoring system. PLEASE HELP!

We are using the Neo Voices, Kate and Paul, in our demos.

ShanieM

Known Participant

Klepi, have you tried this?

If you look at the slide's audio track in the timeline you can see, if you hover the mouse over it, that there is a shadowy highlight, BUT you can see at the end of the slide, that the highlight doesn't go all the way to the end of the audio waveform. You will also see, if you play the slide, that the end of the waveform gets shorter after it plays the entire thing.

If you click on the audio track and "shake it" back and forth, or move it a little on the timeline, it will go away and fix the problem. You can see when the waveform snaps back into the highlighted area.

Not a solution, but it may help get your project done.

A

Anonymous

SMattox wrote:
Klepi, have you tried this?
If you look at the slide's audio track in the timeline you can see, if you hover the mouse over it, that there is a shadowy highlight, BUT you can see at the end of the slide, that the highlight doesn't go all the way to the end of the audio waveform. You will also see, if you play the slide, that the end of the waveform gets shorter after it plays the entire thing.
If you click on the audio track and "shake it" back and forth, or move it a little on the timeline, it will go away and fix the problem. You can see when the waveform snaps back into the highlighted area.
Not a solution, but it may help get your project done.

Yes, I have tried this, but thank you for your reply. At first, I didn't understand what the original poster meant, but once I got it, I did that to every slide in one project. I noticed that the audio extended past what was highlighted when I hover (as was said) for many of the slides and tried shaking it back and forth a little, which actually revealed a bit of the waveform at the beginning that had been hidden. After doing this to every slide (almost - only a few don't have audio), start to finish, I published and found that, while it was better than before, not all of the skips were gone. Perhaps this is due to an entirely different issue? As I mentioned before - it is fine on some computers (the Mac I made it on, my co-worker's Windows machine) and not on others (my Windows workstation, a Windows machine in a conference room). I even thought it may have been the connection and the pre-loader (set to 100%) not working right and copied the file to each computer. No difference.

Then, after that, I tried the trick mentioned very early on of adding audio to outer ends of the audio. I had tried this on a few slides originally, but it didn't seem to help much. Without any other options, I went all-in with that and tried it on every slide as well. What this seemed to do is to take away the parts that were automatically detected as silence. Essentially, now every slide has audio equal to the length of the slide. For example:

You can see I have an 8s slide with a ~1s sound (a sort of a chime) at 3s. The rest is silence. Before, this appeared only as a ~1s long chunk of sound, vs. this, where it shows 8s of sound with almost 7s of it being silence.

It seems that, based on my understanding of the syncing issue blog post and the original post with this solution, this is essentailly "re-stitching" the previously separated audio chunks. But, I am wondering now if that original poster had the updated AudioOptions.ini. Would changing this value allow the audio to be stitched? Would this make the audio and the slides unbearably out of sync?

Honestly, I am desperate for an answer and would be willing to do this horribly tedious edit to each slide as a stopgap until a more permanent and reasonable solution is found...if only it will work (consistently).

A

Anonymous

OK! It seems I ended up answering my own question. I set StitchPublishAudio to 1, which I assumed turns stitching back on. I noticed maybe 2 short skips (may have been breaks of silence in the middle of a word) that are probably from the ridiculous amount of audio editing I've been doing. I will have to reinsert my original audio. It's better than words being missing from it like before. This is only after watching the one project once and I haven't tried it in the conference room yet (which was the worst), but I wanted to share the news of my success! Hopefully, it's not premature!

Now, with my other project, I'll see what exact mix of workarounds I need to get on track and report back!

A

Anonymous

New development: It doesn't happen on all computers, just most. It plays fine on one coworker's computer. Could it be flash-related then?

tlmurray23

Inspiring

I once did a test of a number of Flash versions and we did find differences. Also, it is usually the case that if you play it once (and get the problem), if you rewind and play it again, it works.

A

Anonymous

Yes, I have found that too - but again, not always. In some cases, if I rewind it, the skip happens again in the same spot.

ShanieM

Known Participant

Hi guys,

I too have this issue on several projects. These work-arounds mostly helped, but there are still a few times that this happens. I have found that it is possible to see what is happening during this.

If you look at the slide's audio track in the timeline you can see, if you hover the mouse over it, that there is a shadowy highlight, BUT you can see at the end of the slide, that the highlight doesn't go all the way to the end of the audio waveform. You will also see, if you play the slide, that the end of the waveform gets shorter after it plays the entire thing.

If you click on the audio track and "shake it" back and forth, or move it a little on the timeline, it will go away and fix the problem. You can see when the waveform snaps back into the highlighted area.

I do have screen shots of this, if it will help out at all.

S

SSchwa

Inspiring

Hi there,

We were able to successfully fix the audio being cut off by creating a new project and copying the slides from our original project into the new one. But I would be intereseted in trying your suggestion if this problem ever arises again. I think I understand what you are explaining, but if you have screen shots you could share, that would be great.

Thanks!

ShanieM

Known Participant

Here is the best picture to show it. Notice how the darker shadow on the audio track in the timeline doesn’t cover the whole track.

You can also see in files #1 & 2 (attached) the wave before playing (1) and after playing (2). It visibly shortens while you watch.

Hope it helps!

Shanie Mattox, CTS-I, DMC-E

Crestron South Ext 13014

J

joebor1776

Known Participant

Are you using the Neospeech voices? I've had this issue (with speech cutting off at the end of the slide) with the Kate and Paul voices--yea, the only way to fix that is put that code at the end, which is a pain.

But I have not noticed the problem with the Loquendo Simon voice or with IVONA voices.

D

dparkerukAuthor

Known Participant

Hi Joe,

Thanks for trying to help. I am using the 'David' voice .. that is .. my own . I am recording my voice using Audio > 'Record to'.

I get this is basically a scalability issue. It seems that a whole load of wacky things happen when you get over a certain size/number of slides. Sound starts to get out of sync/cut-off, animation/effects get out of sync/slow down ..... It seems that the best way to prevent these problems is to try to keep each .cptx to under 70 slides

Cheers,

David

A

Anonymous

Hi David,

We are in process of investigating this issue, we are collecting projects from different people to boil down to a particular root cause of the issue. It will be great if you can share your project with me. You may choose to upload the project to acrobat.com and mail the download link to ashwin at adobe dot com.

Thanks

Ashwin Bharghav B

Adobe Captivate Team.

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