Help with Skipping Audio (MP4 or YouTube Export)

Hi,

When I publish video files from a Captivate project, such as creating an MP4 file or publishing directly to YouTube, my project frequently has skipping audio (like a skipping compact disc or vinyl record) and some gaps of silence. How bad? The problem occurs three or four times in a ten minute video, for example. The errors are inherent to the file and not to the playback. (I can rewind and hear the exact same skipping.)

I just upgraded to Captivate 7 hoping to see better video export performance. (In 5.5, I was seeing gaps of silence that would result in the audio becoming further and further out of sync with video, and the YouTube uploader tool refused login.)

Question: Are there certain settings or compression options that will reduce audio skipping when exporting to a video file? If I lower my standards a little I can avoid these problems?

Details: I am making videos that run between 5 minutes and 30 minutes, between 40 and 150 slides. I use a USB microphone to record the videos and generally end up re-editing and re-recording each slide's audio later. I generally avoid FMR as I find it too buggy, though I turn it on and off for quick exmples. Some slides in my project have no audio track, some have a few seconds, some have up to a minute of audio. I have reduced from the 128kbs setting to the 96kbs setting, with no improvement. When I publish in flash, I do not encounter any audio problems and the projects look great.

I frequently use Captivate under Parallels on a MacBook Pro (2.2 Ghz Intel Core i7). Sometimes I boot directly into Windows 7. (There is no discernable difference.) I have 10 GB of RAM and maintain at least 5GB of free hard drive space in both Mac OS and Windows 7 partitions on my drive. I avoid processor-heavy or extensive harddrive activity while compiling... usually I just leave it alone to work.

Thanks for any input or suggestions,
Douglas