Participant

Question

Timing PowerPoint Animations

Forum|Forum|18 years ago
October 25, 2007
12 replies
6650 views

I've just imported a PowerPoint presentation into Captivate 3. Most of the 25 slides have bullet-point advances and other animations built in to them. The live presenter advances the animations manually, as she talks to the slides. I've got her voice recorded, and want to trigger the animations in time with the audio. Does Cap 3 allow me to do this? It doesn't seem so.
thanks!

Import export

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E

eholz1

Known Participant

Hello Captivators and CatBandit et al,

I was wrestling with the PowerPoint Import issue to Captivate 3 myself.
I agree with most of the negative input above. I too, had/have just a basic PPT presentation, just the normal display a line of text when I click the mouse. I can re-create the entire slide in captivate, using the PPT for a background, and adding the animated text with Captivate. It would take longer to create in Captivate than in PowerPoint. Maybe 1 to 2 minutes more per slide. I am now testing (sorry!) Camtasia Studio! It imports PowerPoint without issue. I am not developing interactive presentations, so I can use Camtasia Studio. If I wanted interactivity, I would use Captivate, and bite the bullet as far as developing animations, etc. PowerPoint does have a nice feature with its "WordArt" where I can create diff styles of text and symbols. This type of graphics takes much more time for Captivate, as I would have to use Flash, Photoshop, etc to create graphics for Captivate.

Thanks for a good forum,

eholz1
Middle-weight Captivate user

D

DTSAGGIE72

Participating Frequently

Anniekrs - My experience has been that the import just is not worth the hassle. The learning curve on creating the presentation directly in Captivate is not steep enough to merit fooling with the PPT import. You have much more control and richer options creating directly in Captivate. It makes good sales literature, it just does not work.

K

ksus

Participating Frequently

For what it's worth...

I too have found the PPT import of animations worthless. Here is the basics of my work around, not elegant but it does work.

Create PPTs as usual. Add animations, etc.

Open a new Captivate project. And choose Software Simulation and Full Screen. I temporarily set my screen resolution to 800x600 as that is the size of the project I desire. If you want higher resolution, by all means use what you want. You may want to turn off recording of the cursor, etc. so they don't show

I step through my PPT presentation in slide show mode (full screen) with animations, recording my audio commentary, etc. You do not have to do the whole thing at once you can do parts of it and append it to your Captivate project. Hit a few manual captures before you start to give you some slides you can remove if necessary from the start.

Stop Captivate recording when the presentation (or the part you want to record) is done. Save your Captivate file and change your screen resolution back to what you normally use.

Now when you look at your Captivate file, it will be sized at 800x600.

Also, you may find for some animations that you need to turn on/off full motion recording using F9/F10 but mostly animations work fine.

Hope this helps.

CatBandit

Inspiring

Thank you Dr. B.. A solid but imaginative solution, at least for a portion of the problems. For what its worth, and knowing its no help, I too believe that it is easier and more effective to just create the PPT animation effects inside Captivate ... then to frustrate yourself trying to fit the square peg that is the Power Point animation into the round hole that is Captivate's audio and timeline.

Have a good day, and again, thanks Dr. B.
~regards,
Larry

CatBandit

Inspiring

HI jgreen1024,

First, I wouldn't recommend that you pay $39 for a ticket. But if you do, I wouldn't tell you to expect to get much "real" value, on a ticket like the one you are posing. The reason is, they are going to tell you it just can't be helped. And they are probably right, for most intents and purposes.

It can be problematic when you try to synchronize the internal animation on any animated slide with other objects on that slide ... and for the very reasons you and others mention. The animation doesn't really exist on the time-line like other objects do.

And viewing animation on a single-slide basis will often "fool you" because when it is published and seen with the activity on slides before and after it, the timing is rarely what it seemed to be when viewed by itself.

I just wouldn't want to try what you are doing with animated PPT files, given the current state of development of Captivate's interactions with those PPTs.

Off the top, have you ever tried using Star Office 8? It has a Power Point wannabee that isn't as full featured, but at $69 you get the entire suite - a "Writer", an "Excel" look-alike spreadsheet, and a Power point-like app, all of which do a great job, and all of which can open documents created by their counterparts in the MS Office Suite (although they do have disclaimers stating that some functions might be lost). You can develop content in the PPT look-alike called "Impress", and then save it as a PPT file and bring that into Captivate. Just thinking out loud, but I use "Star Office 8" all the time and enjoy it for its simplicity.

Have a good weekend ...
Larry

J

jgreen1024

Participant

What I don't understand about that point is that the animation timing DID get imported properly. When I go through the slide inside Captivate in the Edit function, the transitions are right there. I set an animation to happen 30 seconds into the slide, and right at 30 seconds in the edit view, the view changes.

However, if I go to record audio, I noticed that 30 second transition didn't appear until 40 seconds in. The next transition should be 45 seconds later - when recording audio, it shows up 60 seconds later. So the import happened, Captivate knows about the correct timings, it's just screwing them up during recording. My guess is that some timer is running in slow motion.

I guess next I'll try to fool it by setting the animation to run faster than I want it and see if that works. But it would be nice if this got fixed.

J

jgreen1024

Participant

Well, success of sorts. I set the 30 second transition to happen at 23 seconds, and the 45 second transition to happen at about 35 seconds, and through trial and error got it to come out OK in the end. Not the best but at least the final product looks OK. Hope they fix this one.

J

jgreen1024

Participant

I've got a related but different problem. I set up animations in Powerpoint to start after x number of seconds. After importing, it looks like the animation timing was preserved, and in fact if I play a slide back in the Edit tab, the animation shows correctly and at the correct time. But when I produce the final video, or if I look at a preview of the final product, the animation never happens.

Any ideas? Looks to me like a product bug.. If I pay $39 to open a support case do I get some assurance that it'll get fixed? :)

CatBandit

Inspiring

georgiegreg, I've sent you a PM (private message). If you wish, use the link provided and I'll take a look at your file. If we can get it fixed the way you want it, we (you) can report back here so others know what was done. If we cannot get it working the way you wish, we will at least have done our (my) best, and we will know that you should reach out to others, or give up the idea as un-doable. Fair?
~best~
Larry

D

DTSAGGIE72

Participating Frequently

OK I am late to the party here. I have followed your instructions. And while it does give me the same number of click boxes as points, however I do not seem to be able to alter the length of time that it takes to display the points.

How does one change the length of time between the points? I must be missing something here...

A

Anonymous

I must say that I'm with DTSAggie on this one. I've followed the instructions but can't see how to sync up the appearance of individual bullets with specific points in the audio narration. I want the bullets to appear one at a time as they are spoken about, and to not require a user click to advance.
CatBandit (or anyone else who has gotten this to work), can you please help?!
Thanks!

D

DTSAGGIE72

Participating Frequently

I was not able to successfully import the powerpoint into Captivate for at least two reasons.
1. The import reduced the quality of the graphics that were in the presentation to an unacceptable level.
2. The timing of the imported animations could not be altered. Nothing that anyone in these forums suggested had a positive impact on that.

There are two alternatives in my limited experience.
1. Time the powerpoint completely prior to import so that there is no need to change the the timing of the slide. For there is no way to do that once the presentation has been imported.
2. Use powerpoint to rough out your presentation and then create it directly in Captivate. This is, in my view, the only alternative if you have graphic images that you wish to show in your presentation or if you anticipate the need to edit the timing or add to the presentation in the future.

The results are great. It is tedious. The Powerpoint import is not as advertised.

CatBandit

Inspiring

Thanks Phil, for the thought. Hope it serves you and others well.

In honesty, my favorite solutions are those that are thought not to exist.

Thanks again.
.

D

docedoc

Known Participant

Larry,

I must say, "That's clever". I've been pondering the situation and thinking, no way. Thanks for thinking up that trick -- could come in handy some time.

Phil

CatBandit

Inspiring

Hi guys! My apologies for not responding - when I first posted, I forgot to "Subscribe" to this topic, so I wasn't getting any notification of your posts. With that out of the way, I DID misunderstand the original question. So to avoid having too much egg on my face, I started experimenting to see if I could actually accomplish this ... and yes, it can be done.

The question is actually "How do we pause and restart an animation object?" (to sync it with the audio on that slide). The answer is in duplicating the click-box on that slide. Let's see if I can put it into steps for you:
================================================

With the audio inserted, and the PPT animation object on the slide ...

1) Click the slide preview button (below and to the left of the timeline)
... or ...
........... 1a) Grab the slide Playhead (the red bar) and "scrub" the timeline
........... 1b) If it's not visible, click the top of the time-line on the "seconds" bar

2) Watch/Listen for the point you need to insert a stop, and "Pause" there

3) Insert a new click-box at that point on the time-line (and stop the 1st one here)

4) Continue from that point, once again pausing when required by audio
......... 4a) or watch the bullets as they appear and sync to that if you wish

5) Again, insert another new click-box at that point (stopping the prior one at the same time-line point)

================================================
Continue as required. There is some work involved, but if you play with this a little, you'll find that it can be done easily and accurately. The trick is as simple as stopping playback with multiple click-boxes at the points you want to pause. When done, you will as many click-boxes as you have bullets or other transitions on the slide; just be sure none of the click-boxes overlap.

This is an answer to a different problem than I originally thought, but I hope it it helpful. Again, I apologize for not "subscribing" to the topic after my original reply. Usually I do that with every post, but "stuff happens".

Ciao ~
.

K

ksus

Participating Frequently

I can get recorded PPT presentations that have animations on slides to import into Captivate 3. These presentations are recorded with audio and the resulting Captivate slides do show the animation. Howerver, the animations in Captivate all happen one after the other with no delays; whereas, the recorded PPT presentation had delays in animations that were advanced via mouse clicks.

As I look at the resulting Captivate SWF slides there appears to be no way to change the fact the animations all happen one after another so I could not "retime" my audio to coordinate with the Captivate animation.

Am I missing something? I appreciate feedback.

S

Stoker10Author

Participant

Hello, again. My experience is still like that described by Dr. B. I'd like to thank CatBandit for your reply, but can you say more about the actual steps you'd take to achieve your result? Thank you.

Like Dr. B, I cannot seem to change the timing of a triggered animation within a Captivate slide. When my SME spoke to the slide deck, she'd trigger an animation that might have three or four moves all triggered by the one mouse click. If she varied in her timing while it played live, it seemed like no big deal. But in a self-paced way, if her voice doesn't line up perfectly with the animations, then it's too confusing to look at.

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