Captivate laggy, captions and audio out-of-sync, Mac sad face in timeline

Report · Sep 04, 2024

One of my biggest gripes with Captivate is it's almost reliable unreliability toward the end of a project. I am nearing the end of a time-sensitive project that previously worked without issue, and in the last few days has been intermittently sloooow. Previously perfectly synced audio and captions are now out-of-sync. One a few slides (but not all) a Mac "sad face" icon showed up at the top of the timeline.

I do not have time for this. I've tried making sure any imported images are as small as possible so as not use up too much space. I do use multi-state objects a lot to cycle through content instead of breaking it up into multiple slides...Could that be it?

In any case, if anyone here has seen this Mac icon, or experienced cases in which the audio kicks in a good 5-10 seconds after you hit play, and then the captions are all out of whack...and you figured out how to fix that, please let me know. Thanks!

Mary

Report · Sep 04, 2024

Given that the sad icon you show is related to a specific item on your timeline, I would first be asking what that item is. Can you provide more information.

I'm not a Mac user, but if that line item represents something heavy such as a video or the audio track. then the icon might simply be saying that this item has not yet downloaded. If it happens to be the audio track then that would explain why things are out of sync.

Report · Sep 13, 2024

Hi @RodWard sorry for the delayed reply. It wasn't for a specific item, but only happening on a specific slide. I definitely am pushing the bounds (I suppose, without knowing what those really are) for that particular slide. It's almost 15 minutes long out of a 2-hr. module. I kept it contained into one slide by using states, but probably should have (and likely will do) split it up into at least two slides. I just am in a time crunch (module due today) and did not have the time to re-sync captions and edit the audio to split it up.

I just wondered if anyone else had seen that icon and experienced the lagging captions, etc. I've noticed it a couple of times.

Do we know whether there is a limit (or suggested upper) for the number of object states on a slide? If not, I might propose fewer than 16, given the issues I've been having.

Thanks!

Mary

Report · Sep 14, 2024

I would suggest you try to keep each slide to somewhere less than 3 minutes. Less than one minute is even better, though that is not always possible depending on subject matter. The problem is always going to be that the more things (objecs, actions, etc) you pack into a single slide, the more likey you will run in to problems on that slide, and the more difficult it will be to debug the issue.

Try to keep everything as simple as possible. Think about who will need to maintain the content in future. If a year or two goes by, even if YOU are the one maintaining it, you will still struggle to remember how you set everything up.