Captivate 2017 videos on slides randomly have the ends cut early (cut off).

Report · Apr 10, 2018

Hey everyone,

I've seen it posted before for older versions but the issue still remains so I'm going to re-ask the question. Our team will create a Captivate file with a few slides that contain video clips. When published as HTML 5, these video slides work fine. When publishing as video the ends of the video clips within the slide will get cut off. The amount of time cut off seems to be random. I have tried the following:

extending the slide to be longer than the video
changing the frame rate of the video (30fps is recommended)
turning advance compression on and off
adding extra slide frames to the beginning
changing the key-frame distance in the source video
renaming the source video
recreating the slide from scratch.
inserting the video into a new project
Changing the project skin and the player skin.
It happens to event and multi-slide synced videos
It can happen in a template based file or completely blank file (at one point I thought it was the template that we use but the issue finally happened in a blank file. It seems to be randomly occurring issue so far).
We are using h.264 video at 30 fps as recommended.

It's really frustrating as we need to have a HTML5 and Video version of all of our material. Right now we have to video capture from the HTML5 version. A real pain.

I've spent a few hours turning things on and off, trying to reduce the number of variables and I'm pretty sure it's something deep in Captivate and not the video files or anything we've done to our Captivate file. And the fact that in a brand new, blank captivate file the multiple videos we've tried have a 90% chance of having the ends cut off tells me that there's something wrong in the code. Even the same video file can sometimes work and sometimes not.

Anyone have any ideas?

Report · Apr 10, 2018

If you don't get an answer, that means the problem could be not appearing that way for other users? I rarely use video as output, I want realy eLearning which needs interactivity

However, I pop in because of this sentence: ....in a template based file ....

Are you talking about a file created based on a cptil file? Because at this moment there is a serious bug with cptl-files, I would recommend never to use them.

For the sake of (hopefully) users that could help you: which version are you using and on which OS?

Report · Apr 10, 2018

Thanks for popping in. We do a bit of interactivity as well but we produce a video version both for archival as well as a proofing workflow. It's also great if someone has issues accessing the LMS, they can go to our video site and watch it there.

I actually got on a call with Captivate support and ran through some troubleshooting. The issue happens whether or not we use a template file. We create our own templates and I thought that could be the issue.... something in our template could be causing the issue. But that's not the case. The tech that consulted with me could reproduce the same issue in a blank captivate project. That rules out templates of any kind being the culprit.

Here's an oddity though. If the video was placed on a slide with no slides before it, it worked fine and did not truncate the video. If there was a slide before it, the video output would be truncated. This is in a blank project... as vanilla as could be mind you. This happens both in the windows and mac version of Captivate 2017 too (it's the most recent build).

Captivate support has bumped up the issue and said they should have some more info within 48 hours (I've heard that before unfortunately). But I do expect some response. I'll keep the thread informed.

I really appreciate your input btw. Any help to narrow this down makes a difference!

Report · Apr 10, 2018

It looks like a loading issue, from what you explain about slides. SImiar isse can happen with long audio files which hae to be loaded on enter of a slide. There a possible solution is to delay the audio file a little bit on the slide. Did you try that for the videos? You could add a static image to bridge the gap. Just an idea.

Report · Apr 10, 2018

If you read my laundry list of the solutions I tried, your suggestion is in there. I pushed the video forward a few frames which didn't help. I also put a few frames at the end in another test which also didn't help. The video in question is 34 sec (very short). We have many courses with videos that are much longer that seem to work fine. Length of video doesn't not seem to be a factor.

Report · Apr 10, 2018

Sorry to have missed that, my apologies. I will leave you to video experts, or perhaps Adobe will sort a solution?

Report · Apr 11, 2018

Oh no problem. It's a long list. I posted that list to save any other poor soul that is having the same issues so they can skip some of the steps I did. I appreciate the input!

Report · Apr 30, 2018

I just got an email back from Adobe support (20 days after my phone call with them) and they said that it's a known bug and it's on the list to fix. I was initially impressed that they even followed up and then doubly so when someone called back to say the same. I figured my issue was lost in the wind. I told them I appreciated the follow up and I would look forward to any updates (which they promised they would give me).

The next email I got a few minutes later was that my issue had been CLOSED. What the hell.

Just to be clear,

This issue is NOT RESOLVED because this issue is NOT FIXED. This is a mission critical feature for us that does not work. Putting it on a pile of things to fix later is not a resolution. It's a way to improve your customer service score internally.

And the issue being closed means there's no link to me once (or if) the problem is corrected. The email and phone call to me was only to close the issue and get it off the list. I'm so done with this team. They are literally doing the minimum to support their customers.

Report · Apr 10, 2018

Did you encode these videos using Adobe Media Encoder or some other encoding tool. If not AME, please try that tool. Sometimes video issues are related to small differences in encoding. Adobe software tends to prefer its own encoding solutions.

Report · Apr 11, 2018

Yeah, I only use AME. And captivate is barely an Adobe product in many ways lol. I had to beg their development team to recommend the best codec settings to use. The most specific they would give me is to use H.264 at 30 fps. I've handed over the some of the videos we use to their support team. It's not the video content as sometimes it will cut them off and sometimes it won't. It depends on what is before or after the slide containing the content.

Report · Apr 30, 2018

Two thoughts:

1. Don't assume 30fps is the only option. I think CP plays at...15fps by default? Or did when it was for Flash? Or maybe I'm thinking of Flash.... At any rate, maybe can't hurt to change the FPS output and see if the result changes.

2. Interesting 'depends on what is before or after the slide'. As you know, if you have interactive content on CP slides, that won't 'work' as video. I don't know if I've ever tried to publish an interactive CP as a video, but I bet the inability to render the interactive components as they're intended could be a factor in the issue (?).
So are your before/after slides interactive? Or are they just straightforward presentation slides with no buttons, etc?

If yes to buttons, etc...maybe make a copy of the piece and remove all the interactive pieces that stop the timeline, then publish to video. Same issue? Or is the issue resolved? (not that it really helps if you need interactive slides, but it helps define the problem)...and in which case you could work-around it by using CP or Camtasia to record someone going through the piece and publish that as a video...though, granted, not as time efficient.

Report · May 01, 2018

The 30fps number was from Deep Raushan Roy the Sr. Technical Support Consultant when I asked for the best possible format / codec to use for smooth streaming w/o buffering. We no longer use flash due to the many issues we ran into. But as to your suggestion, we tried lower fps (including 15) with no joy.

We tried putting slide content before and after the video slide. When we noticed that it had an effect on the cut off, we then started with a blank captivate slide with the 1st slide being totally blank, 2nd slide with video content and 3rd slide being blank again. So they were straight forward with no content whatsoever.

It's just a coding bug according to Adobe.

At this point we use Snagit or Screenflow to capture our presentations.

You were thinking exactly down the lines we tried.

Report · Jul 12, 2018

Hi John,

I'm currently working on a project that keeps acting like yours...there are around 10 slides with short clips, and 2 of them keep getting cut. It´s driving me crazy and the client is getting upset.

Have you had any feedback from the captivate support team?, I´ll appreciate any input or workaround if you have it.

Thanks in advance!

Report · Jul 12, 2018

Hey there ipatinoal,

The only workaround was to use snagit (windows app) or screenflow (mac) to literally screen capture the preview that plays from Captivate. We have heard NOTHING from Adobe on this. It's persisted through every hotfix for both Windows and Mac platforms (we use both). It's been a huge disappointment.

Report · Jul 12, 2018

Thanks for taking the time to reach back and so fast!. I really appreciate it.

The workflow unfortunately isn't a choice for us. I´ll take a chance of luck and try an awful trick..add some sort of "noise" at the end of the video to increase its length, and pray captivate keeps failing so it cuts-off the noise and not the part of the video that I need to be seen.

It´s unbelievable that a problem like this stays unfixed for so long..I´ll try and reach adobe and let you know how that goes.

Report · Jul 17, 2022

I discovered this thread today (17 JUL 2022) when doing a Google search on "Adobe Captivate Interactive Video Truncated." I'm using Captivate 2019 (not 2017) and the problem is still there.

For context, here's what I'm doing and what I'm observing:

1. I create a video as an MP4 file (using a different screen capture tool, not Captivate).

2. I upload that MP4 file to Vimeo (to serve as the video host/streaming service because our LMS server is not as efficient at streaming video).

3. In Captivate, on a blank slide, I click on "Interactive Video," and I insert the Vimeo URL for the video.

4. I do this for all of the slides in my Captivate project, too. (And to clarify, a single Captivate project for me may have anywhere from 10 to 27 slides, each one with an embedded Vimeo link. Our Captivate projects consist *only* of a series of Vimeo-hosted videos. There's nothing else in our Captivate projects. We use Captivate only for SCORM publishing to work with our LMS.)

5. To publish the Captivate project as a SCORM .zip file, I select "SCORM 1.2" in the "Quiz Prefernces" window. (And to clarify, our LMS supports only SCORM 1.2.)

6. I publish the Captivate project as a .zip file using the HTML5 output format.

7. I upload the SCORM .zip file to our LMS and make it available to our clients.

The problem is: some of our clients have reported that sometimes the end of a given video gets truncated. Sometimes a given video is truncated by a few seconds. Sometimes it's truncated by a minute or two. And sometimes, that same video isn't truncated at all.

It's an inconsistent problem. Only some clients see this problem occur. And those clients see this problem occur only some of the time...even when playing that same video multiple times. It's very frustrating.

The only hypothesis that we've come up with that makes sense is the following:

When you embed a video in a Captivate slide from an external source (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo), Captivate queries the video source at the moment you insert it in a slide to determine how long the video is. Captivate then sets the slide duration to match the length of that video. Then, at playback time, Captivate doesn't actually know when the linked video comes to its natural end, it simply advances to the next slide automatically when the slide duration timer expires. And this could produce two possible problems:

1. If (for some reason) the video playback takes longer than its advertised duration (because of lag in the YouTube or Vimeo server), the internal Captivate slide duration timer will expire and advance to the next slide before the video playback actually finishes...and thus the end of the video appears truncated.

Or,

2, If (for some reason) the video playback takes less time than its advertised duration, the video playback will (actually) finish before the internal Captivate slide duration timer expires, and the result is that the video loops back to the beginning and begins playing again. Then when the internal Captivate slide duration timer expires, it ends that (second) playback of the video and advances to the next slide/video.

And yes, our clients have actually observed both of these problems. And both are explained by the same underlying root cause: the only communication between a published Captivate project and an external video streaming service (YouTube, Vimeo) occurs at the moment when you advance to a particular slide in the project. At that moment, the Captivate project follows the link you embedded in the slide to trigger playback of that video...and that's it. From that point forward, there's no further communication with that external video streaming service while the triggered video is playing back, so the published Captivate project has no way of knowing when the video reaches its end; it advances to the next slide when its internal slide duration timer expires.

I did the Google search today and found this thread because I'm looking for a way to stop Captivate from automatically advancing to the next slide when the slide duration timer expires. Instead, I want it to wait for the user to click somewhere (either on the slide or in the Table of Contents) before advancing. In theory, this should solve the truncation problem.

What troubles me is that you reported this issue in 2018 using the 2017 version of Captivate. It's now 2022 and the problem is still there even in the most recently updated version of Captivate 2019. Doesn't give me a lot of confidence in Adobe's product support and customer service.

Report · Jul 18, 2022

You may ignore this. Answers in this forum are given by other users. Avoid posting the same question twice, please! I have answered exactly the same question an hour ago in another thread. FYI as moderator and active user of this forum I get notifications about all questions and comments in threads I follow. And since I answer a lot of questions, avoiding seeing same question twice or even multiple times spares me some time.