Inspiring

Question

Why is Adobe Captivate so slow?

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
June 13, 2017
13 replies
10190 views

I am using a late 2013 MBP with 16GB RAM, and the latest version of Adobe Captivate downloaded with my Creative Cloud subscription, but I consistently find that Adobe Captivate runs especially slow. Enough to hinder my day-to-day workflow.

I've noticed that it will only use a max of 3GB of RAM, and doesn't seem to be taking advantage of the full capabilities of the CPU, as my CPU % sits at around 15-20, even while performing presumably resource-intensive tasks. I could understand if it was maxing out the CPU and performing poorly, because at least it was using all the resources it could to try and deliver the best performance. But it is laggy and slow without even using the resources available to it.

Does anyone know if you can adjust the RAM or CPU allocation settings for Adobe Captivate? I've used other software that performed poorly before, but I was able to adjust the settings for how many resources I allocated to it, and saw great performance gains.

As an example of just how slow Adobe Captivate is for me, I like to move objects on the slide with shift+arrow keys for precise placement. Adobe Captivate is so slow that I can press the arrow key about ten times one direction, and then just sit there for almost a full minute and just watch the object slowly make its way to my desired location. Comparing this to other software on my MacBook, it is extremely slow. Keynote for example provides the same functionality, however objects snap to the position I move them to in real-time, with no lag whatsoever.

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mikem60363691

Participant

What I don't understand is that it sometimes exports a course quickly - change a few settings, such as "always completes" to "completes on passed," it takes much longer - and often crashes. Very minor adjustments.

This includes if I clear cache or if I don't from previous exports.

For comparison, I exported a course in 7 minutes, changed a setting and it took over 50 minutes to a different directory - and crashed. Tried again, over 40 minutes, then crashed. Next day, try again - it took almost 20 minutes, but worked that time at least.

I'm at a loss as to why this would occur - it's the same source, same computer, just different times of day. I've eliminated cache as a possibility because I've cleared it after the first crash, rebooted computer, etc.

RodWard

Community Expert

Are you doing the following:

Opening CPTX files that are already residing in folders on your PC hard drive, NOT on a network?
Attempting to publish these files ONLY to folders on your PC hard drive and NOT on another server or virtual folder location?

paula.obrien

Participating Frequently

I'm experiencing similar issues and have cleared the cache multiple times per day. I'm on Captivate 2019, 11.5.1.499 with Windows 10 enterprise v1803. My system has Intel xeon cpu e3-1545M v5 2.90 ghz processor, 32GB ram and I only have open my Captivate project which is 53MB and does not contain any video. I'm working on a few slides that have shapes for buttons and shapes for content (e.g., a flow-chart visual). I have preview slides set to "2" slides. After going into the state views for the slide layers I try to type in the shapes and after typing I wait a couple of minutes to see letters appear. As well, when I exit state view it's not prompting me to save, so I save within state view and there is a minute or two lag time between clicking the Save button and actually seeing the process begin. When I attempt to preview the two slides (the next one is a tab interaction with three tabs and only text content so far), I get the dialog box that shows about 25% of the process complete and "Not Responding" in the title bar. OneDrive is running in the background, and I have not done any other work between Saturday morning and this morning (Monday). IT says there were global updates last Wednesday, but none going on today. Captivate is installed locally. On Friday I was working on these same slides and only got 5 slides done in 8 hours, which should have been at most a couple of hours of work.

Lilybiri

Legend

I did see a lot of people having issues with OneDrive.... although I always work on documents that are synchronized with OneDrive, and on systems with lower specifications than yours, do not have that slow experience. In most cases I have also Photoshop, Illustrator and more open besides Captivate. I have a dedicated graphics card in two PC's, but not in my Surface Pro where I do create as well.

Can you try to ttransfer the document to a location which is outside of the documents synchronized with OneDrive to see if you have the same experience?

O

ocr1987

Participant

Hello,

I had the same problem, I solved it by changing the screen resolution to 1600x1900 or less depending on the machine.

The problem seems to be in the power of the video card or in the optimization of captivate vs video cards at high resolutions.

I describe the MAC where I work:

- Mac pro (late 2013)

- 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor

- Memory 32 GB 1866 MHz DDR3

- AMD FirePro D700 6 GB video card

- SSD

P

Pedro Rosario Rodriguez

Participant

Your suggestion worked for me. Thanks a lot!!

K

kenhes

Inspiring

If you can, I find it helps to move the cache folder to a totally different hard drive ie a hard drive where the cptx isn't saved.

N

Nutley

Known Participant

Captivate has been fine for ages now, no speed issues to report at all with the last two versions (all on a Mac)

Looking at the original poster, he said he was using Captivate as part of his creative cloud subscription. Captivate isn’t part of creative cloud, so I’m wondering if there is confusion all round?

Quite why switching to Articulate has been marked as the correct answer seems a little counter intuative, especially given it’s total lack of Mac support. Given the two options, of course Captivate wins hands down.

I’m certainly very happy with the way Captivate performs now, and any bugs seemed to have been ironed out of late too.

Captivate just works, which is all I want, so I can spend my time trying to create nice stuff.

Lilybiri

Legend

Thanks for reporting this. I took out the 'correct answer' as moderator. It had been marked that way by the OP, but cannot be considered correct anyway for the reasons you mention.

CP has the possibility of a subscription and a perpetual license, one of the reasons why it will probably never be part of the CC which has only subscription licenses.

Thank so much for being a happy Mac user of Captivate! I have some ideas why it doesn't seem to work well for other Mac users.

L

Lord Protophane III

Participating Frequently

Hi Nutley, thanks for that suggestion. I did note you made it earlier.

As a new user of Captivate I'm not sure it's possible to access older versions.

Installing a previous version of Captivate

As a trial user I'm almost certain it isn't.

elearningbuilder11

Inspiring

So whats the solution here? Captivate 2019 is running so slow, and slowing me down so much, that my supervisor wants to change products to Storyline so that we can complete projects on time.

Im on a MAC with:

This SHOULDN'T be a problem for my system, so then why is it?

RodWard

Community Expert

Perhaps your Supervisor is unaware of exactly what is involved in trying to get Articulate Storyline running on a MAC:

Articulate 360 FAQs: Working on a Mac - Articulate Support

Technically speaking, there is no Storyline version that works natively on MAC.

The chip and RAM specs of a machine are only a starting point. They're not the only factors in determining whether or not an app works well on a system. You might need to call on Adobe technical support to resolve the issue.

I use a Windows box and find Captivate works perfectly on that. Perhaps your supervisor could give you one of those.

L

Lord Protophane III

Participating Frequently

No question, this program is rubbish on a Mac. Ps, Ai, Ae, Pr... all run fine on mine. I'm trying a demo. It truly is garbage.

A

Anonymous

I recently started using Captivate. Both on a MacBook Pro and on an iMac Pro. It is unusably slow. No comparison between Captivate and other Adobe CS apps.

A

Anonymous

Hi All,

Lots of interesting feedback with some similar experiences from me.

Rod's point about looking at your cache folder location is crucial. Must be on the local drive. While its possible to edit on a network drive, it is also more ideal to do so on the local drive. Which can be a pain if you're in an enterprise environment and you may need others to edit parts of the project...

My Storyline experience is not as positive. While it appears to be a bit faster, there are still bugs, particularly with HTML5 output. In their defense, Articulate continue to debug at a much faster rate than Adobe.

I also like the ability to develop a responsive project within a single project - not the multiple projects needed for Storyline.

Right now I am developing an interactive project. I tested the initial concept in both Captivate and Storyline. Captivate more time consuming but the interactions appeared when I wanted them to in the final output unlike Storyline.

Horses for courses I guess. No app is perfect.

Andrew

A

andrea_b

Participant

this tool is a pain in the neck

RodWard

Community Expert

Could you be a bit more specific? Hard to diagnose a problem with this description.

A

andrea_b

Participant

it freeze 9 times on 10 in case of any operation. if I have to modify something it takes ages before I can perform the change. It makes me crazy.

J

jarayama

Participating Frequently

Sluggish is the word, seems that the program has been upgrading version to version so the framework is it built is not optimized at all to modern systems, it doesn't matter if you have a powerful GPU or not, the program itself don't do complex math operations to take advantage even if it would be rewritten. I think the app don't have a user base largely enough to make profitable a real app update so surely they'll squeeze it as long as they can and then make it die from people like us that don't tolerate this situation.

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