Animation Playing Slow - Why?

Report · Jun 21, 2010

Captivate 4

Flash CS4

AS2

30FPS

Goodness...

I don't know why I keep coming back to Captivate for my E-Learning needs... I just... I dunno - perhaps I hope this time around will be a miracle, or perhaps it's because I'm not a fan of anything else on the market...

anyhow...

Besides my issues with anti-aliasing in transparent captions... and the quiz slides not working correctly... and captions disappearing... *sigh*...

I'm having an issue with my custom animations. I've created some custom animations in Flash CS4 - nothing fancy - just some stuff sliding around, etc, lasting about... 4 seconds total maybe? I've also created a few interactive stuff, nothing too massive, just click a button to show the next text... okay... great... except - it plays SLOW when previewed/published from my captivate 4 project.

My captivate project consists of about 120 slides (yes yes, I know, it's big - I'm convincing them to cut back) - and the .swf published is around 3MB...

I have my custom animations in flash set to 30fps - and I have my Captivate 4 project set to 30 fps - so that's all groovy, I know that's not the problem...

when I publish, and play JUST the raw .swf - I would say it's reduced to about... 18-20fps on the animations, and actually, the entire project itself... if I try to play it from a published .PDF - forget about it - it slows down easily to about 10 fps - rendering the entire project useless - and HTML is somewhere in between those two...

Any idea why?? I went through my entire project, removing one animation at a time, publishing, and then putting it back in and removing another one - and this did not speed things up at all - so I'm pretty sure it's not a broken script anywhere in one of my animations (I have seen this happen in other projects before)...

Does anyone have any idea what I could look at as far as trying to figure something out?? I would try using a pre-loader, but forget it, it doesn't work either... add that to my list of crap that doesn't work in this program...

I'm stumped... is it just the file size in general?? the last project I worked on was 175 slides, and the same ratio of animations to slides - and I didn't have this problem...

Anybody come across something like this? Any possible solutions out there??

Thank you

Report · Jul 22, 2010

I'm having exactly the same issue with my project - it's only 68 slides long, but makes moderate use of images and Flash animations.

It was working fine until two days ago and now when I view the published version it is running slow - between 1/2 to 2/3 the proper speed it should be running at. All the Flash animations are set to 30fps and the Captivate project itself is set to run at 30fps.

No idea what the problem is - I've even tried publishing the project at 40fps to see if that would make any difference - none at all.

I've going to have to start rebuilding the Flash animations to run at 15fps instead of 30 in a vain effort to try and get them responding at an appropriate speed in the Captivate project....

Report · Jul 26, 2010

Okay, fixed my problem.

The issue was being caused by the number of questions I had in the knowledge check at the end of the package.

I had 10 question pools, each with (on average) about 6 questions in it. Each question slide had an image on it of some description. I had increased the number of question pools from 6 to 10 with a load more questions. Funnily enough, the Flash slowdown occurred after that update.

What I've done now is completely remove the question pools and random question slides from the Captivate e-learning package and placed them in their own package - it just means the user will have to finish the e-learning package, then go on to start the separate knowledge check.

The speed issues have been cleared up - everything is running at full (proper) speed again!

thundercat

Report · Jul 28, 2010

ActusXReus - let me know if removing the questions from the package sorts the problem for you too.