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Known Participant
December 31, 2013
Question

Can't match end of slide to end of object (gap)? [Captivate 6]

  • December 31, 2013
  • 2 replies
  • 1016 views

Lately I seem to be having an issue with making the end of the slide match the end of the last object on the slide. As you can see in the attached image, the longest item on the timeline is the mouse click. (Ignore the shape on the very top; this is a button that has the timing set to display for the rest of the slide. I have tried to set this to "specific time" and make it very short, but that did not affect the outcome of this problem.)

What I would like to do is to drag the slide length to the left and shorten it to match the shorter length of the mouse click. However, I am unable to make the slide duration any shorter.

I think this has to do with the audio I added. I have a longer audio track that I added to the slide, and then I edited it and shortened it. The reason I'm doing this is because I'm showing single steps, and the audio narration bunches together a bunch of steps at once. I'm thinking that maybe, even though the ausio is shortened, Captivate doesn't see this "gap," and won't let me shirten the clip because it still thinks there's audio there? Sometime I fiddle around, and chop some silence from the beginning and end of the audio clip, and it lets me drag it a bit further. But in some cases, like here, for example, I don't have any room for more editing. The audio clip is pretty small now, and I need that little bit of silence remaining. This problem throws my project off, because when you watch the whole thing in one go, it can create odd gaps, jumps, or silences. Even if they are tiny, it makes things seem "off."

Any idea how I can fix this?

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2 replies

Captiv8r
Legend
December 31, 2013

Hi there

Slides simply cannot be adjusted to be any shorter in duration than the longest timed object. In the example image, the longest timed object appears to be a Smart Shape. Thus, the slide must end there and cannot be made shorter.

We simply cannot ignore the Smart Shape as you are advising. Yes, I know you feel confident that the problem cannot be there. Yet my guess is that this is exactly where the problem is.

See, when you told Captivate to make the Smart Shape a button, it likely also gained a pause point. And it's likely the pause point of the Smart Shape on top that is preventing you from adjusting the overall slide duration.

Cheers... Rick

Known Participant
December 31, 2013

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the response, but the Smart Shape was not the problem. The reason I wrote to ignore the Smart Shape was because it was not always the longest timed object on the timeline. I had shortened that object to be .3 seconds long, so it was actually the shortest object on the timeline, and even so, the problem persisted. I was just using that screenshot as an illustration of the gap between the end of the slide, and the end of an object. I'll attach another image that would more accurately represent visually what my timeline looked like.

Captiv8r
Legend
December 31, 2013

Ahhh, okay then.

Indeed, if the timeline is configured as shown in this particular capture, that *IS* an odd thing indeed. Because from what I see, the slide *SHOULD* allow timing to be configured to match the other objects.

Out of curiosity, does anything change if you select all objects on the slide and press Ctrl+E? I might expect that doing this would then allow the slide to be timed to match the audio exactly.

Then again, perhaps you have encountered an undocumented feature.

Cheers... Rick

Known Participant
December 31, 2013

I have discovered that even if the program won't let me drag the slide on the timeline any further, to shorten the duration, I can still achieve the desired slide length (at least in this instance) by going to the properties, and changing the time to whatever duration. Still odd, though.