Problem with PowerPoint Narration in Captivate 9

[muses24]

I have a very long powerpoint with narration. the narration has been recorded to each slide. When I import the powerpoint to captivate, the audio doesn't show on the timeline and I can only hear it if i publish or preview as html 5. Also, you have to click the slide to play the audio. It won't play on it's on. I've been talking to adobe support for two days and no one has been able to help. Any help is appreciated. And yes, I have updated Captivate and checked high fidelity when importing.

[Captiv8r]

Forget all the hype about how easy and great it is that sales tells you it's a magickal world where things seamlessly fly from PPT right on into Captivate and all is happy land.

The ugly truth here is that Importing PPT into Captivate will seldom (if ever) provide satisfactory results.

Why not just produce a video from the PPT?

Your best result will be to carefully re-create the PPT in Captivate if that's what you really want.

Cheers... Rick

[muses24]

You are super correct and I have created videos out of the powerpoint, but the client that created this massive powerpoint would like to turn it into an interactive module. So I was going to import it into Captivate and work on making a few of the slides interactive and then publishing it as an elearning module, but the narration is not importing over like it should. I can export the audio from the Powerpoint and add it to captivate, but it exports in a file extension that Captivate doesn't use. So I would have to convert all of these audio clips. It would take forever.

[Lilybiri]

I believed that PPT has audio files in wav format, which is perfect for importing to Captivate? Has this changed?

[melissa33602]

I know this is an old post, but I am wondering if anyone has come up with a solution for this problem.  I have a Powerpoint presentation with recorded narrations.  I can import the slides into Captivate 9, but no narrations.  I zipped the file and can see that clips are MP4s. I am using Powerpoint 2013.  I have a colleague who recorded narrations in PowerPoint and his file saved as wav files (I think - but not MP4).  His slides and narrations imported into Captivate 9 without any problem.  Is there a way for me to save my PPT file so that it is not an MP4 (maybe that will fix the problem)?  Or, is there a solution for importing my current PPT (with the MP4 files) into Captivate so that the narrations will work? I am sure that I can import each file one-by-one, or re-record everything right from Captivate, but I was hoping to avoid this, if possible.

[BDuckWorks]

Melissa,

I hinted at this further down, but I'll give a bit more details here. I haven't worked with audio within PPT that much, so this technique is an extrapolation of the technique I've used to pull graphics from inside a PowerPoint file into the Captivate Library.

The PowerPoint .pptx file is a 'ZIP archive' with it's extension changed to .pptx.

The best route for this technique, is to make a COPY, and rename the copy from XXX_Copy.pptx to XXX_copy.zip. Open this zip file by right clicking (assuming windows), or you can unzip the files to a new folder. 

Within that folder, you'll a structure similar to this:

Enter the ppt folder, then open the media folder.

(I haven't tried this for audio, but it should be similar to the jpg and png's.)

Look around the folder structure for the .mp4 or .wav files and drag them to a Captivate library, then insert each audio file slide by slide from the library into your project.

[muses24]

I really don't know. the only way i could see the files was by zipping the PPT and unzipping it. It had a media folder with the files and they were m4a i believe. Either way, I've tried everything i can to get it to export with the narration and it won't and adobe support calls me today and tells me it's not meant to, that it will import it as an object, not put it on the timeline and you can only hear it if you publish to html5 and click on the slide. I believe all that is wrong but i don't think they know what the issue is so they just want me off the phone.

[muses24]

Also tried it with storyline it wouldn't import the audio there either.

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

Take your PowerPoint file and rename it so the file extension is now ZIP instead of PPTX. Unzip the resulting converted PowerPoint Zip file. Within the folder structure of the resulting unzip, you will find all the multimedia for the PowerPoint presentation. If you're up for it you can now build a Captivate project from all the resulting assets.

[BDuckWorks]

In case it's not too late, you can also try setting the 'Click to Continue' in PowerPoint to 'Start after Previous.' 

This will trigger the narration to start as soon as the slide begins.

I also use @Paul_Wilson's tip of converting the source file to a ZIP and importing the source materials directly.

I haven't tried this for audio, but it should be similar to the jpg and png's: