Captivate 4 project will not update

[Derbyfan]

I have a large Captivate 4 project (over 100 slides and file size is 181MB) that will not update. It runs through the updating process for a few minutes but then crashes. I have tried updating using Captivate 5, 5.5, and 6. I suspect that it is a limitation due to size, back in those early days there was a known issue with project sizes. Is there anyway I can get a copy of Captivate 4 to install while I try to open the file? If I can open the project long enough to split it up, it would be a great help.

[Lilybiri]

The oldest version I can find online is CP5. When I have a moment free, will look in my old archive to look for CP4, but not sure it is stil there. Did you try to contact Adobe?

CP4 was the last version to support AS2, from 5 on only AS3 is supported for SWF output. I suspect that may be the reason.

[Derbyfan]

You raise a good point. The different versions crash at different stages, but 6 gets as far as updating scripts before failing so it could well be an Action Script issue.

I have not contacted Adobe directly yet, I was hoping someone in the community still had the version 4 install.

[Lilybiri]

Crossing my fingers (may have it but did throw away a lot recently in spring cleanup). That version is 10 years old.

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

My guess is that it's close at hand if the Adobe eLearning team still has a copy for such purposes. Send an email to CaptivateHelp@Adobe.com for assistance on this.

[Derbyfan]

I have emailed Adobe. Let's see what they say.

[Erik Lord]

It could be a memory issue - do you have lots of RAM available on your machine?

Restart and don't open anything else, just CP5, and see if the update succeeds.

[Derbyfan]

I have tried on 3 different machines, one with 8GB ram, fresh install of Cap5 and a cold reboot. Still no luck.

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

I don't know what valuable stuff is contained inside this Captivate project file but consider this. Assuming the 181 MB is due to multimedia that is part of the published version of this project, there will likely be content that is not optimized for delivery over your organization's network. Also, consider that by today's standards 100 slides in a single module is very large. Most IDs would want to further subdivide this up into smaller, more easily digestible chunks. And lastly consider that if this content was created when Captivate 4 was current, this material is 9-10 years old and all that implies. Perhaps your time would be better spent designing a new set of eLearning modules to replace this very dated and aged course.

[Derbyfan]

Some good points Paul. We learnt many years ago, and mainly thanks to this particular course, to keep our courses much smaller, this course was actually split into 4 for subsequent versions, we publish in multiple languages, this particular course exists in 7 languages. On the good side, the content is extremely technical, it has not changed so is still valid. The main problem is, this problem course was translated into Dutch, both text and audio. I do not speak Dutch so if I develop new material it would require our subsidiary to re-translate the material again, not likely to happen. If I can open it long enough to extract captions and export audio I would be a happy camper, hence the push to get a copy of Cap 4. If not I will be doing audio capture, a lot of typing and cutting and pasting. Fortunately, I still have an executable version running in the LMS.

[David Burnham HBA]

Send me an email at info@harperburnham.com I might be able to help with this.

[Derbyfan · Accepted solution]

Final solution.

I was able to get a copy of Captivate 4, courtesy of David Burnham, to open the project. After a little bit of trial and error I was able confirm the suspicion proposed by Lilibiri that it was an action script issue. Once I deleted all of the advanced actions I was able to upgrade the project. Took a while to rebuild the Advanced Actions but much quicker than rebuilding the project.

Thanks to all.