Screen Bleed - Wrong Screen Shows Up When Playing Project

Report · Nov 08, 2012

I'm on Captivate 6.

Creating a demo simulation with a lot of buttons that "Go to Next Slide" or "Go to specific slide. Also have some auto-advance slides based on timing.

When editing, screens look fine. After adding some buttons and hightlight boxes, I then either PREVIEW (both in or out of browser) or PUBLISH (SWF / HTML5 / EXE) and when I play it back, I occasionally will get the wrong background or pieces of the wrong background showing up on the wrong slide.

In one specific case, I took a screen shot of an application with a drop down box in it. When I play it back, I see just the drop down, but it's superimposed on SLIDE 1. But, as mention, in the editor, everything looks perfectly fine.

I also have a auto-advance slide that moves forward after a half-second... when I play back and get to that slide, I see a portion of the top of another slide for about 1/4 second... then I see the actual slide.. .and then it moves forward to the next slide.

There is no rhyme or reason as to why and / or when this occurs. And I can sometimes be 100% fine, but then maybe I cut / paste some buttons / hightlight boxes from one slide to another, and then that slide (which was working fine before) might start having this issue.

I'd like to know if there is a way to easily fix this. It's making it nearly impossible for me to use Captivate to create these, what should be very "simple" demo simulations.

Report · Nov 08, 2012

Have you updated your version of Captivate 6 to 6.01 as yet? If not, go to Help > Update and download/install the patch.

Report · Nov 09, 2012

Yes. I took this update but still saw the problem.

It seems to occur due to having some auto-advance slides mixed in with those that require user interaction (button click) to move to either "Go to the Next Slide" or "Jump to a specific slide".

I add these auto-advance screen shots in order to make my click-through demo simulation look more like a real web application... they are basically the partial screen captures while the web application is painting all of the objects on the screen... I let them display for 0.2 or 0.3 seconds so that it gives feel from a real web application, rather than abruptly jumping to the next, fully displayed screen.

I tried lengthening the amount of time they display, but still have the problem. Then I tried hiding one or two of the transition slides and that seemed to "fix" my issue, including in another location of the project where I did not make the same modification.

Just seems like a random occurrence that will show up a lot for me, so it would be nice to find out how to really fix it instead of just randomly hiding slides, etc.

Report · Jan 16, 2013

Was wondering if you ever resolved this to your satisfaction? I've been having the same problem since we moved to v6 last year. I'll see it with recorded demos where I'll see a part of the previous screen showing up on the next screen and other odd display issues. It seems fairly random where it occurs and I can usually make it go away by republishing several times, but it can be a real pain at times. Your story seems to be the closest thing to what I'm seeing. Thanks!

Report · Jan 16, 2013

While I never resolved this issue, I did find a viable workaround, better than "republishing several times" (and then having to re-verify every single screen in my demo was correct), which was initially the only way I could get around the problem.

What I have found is if you do a "select all" slides (i.e. click on first slide and then CNTL-A) and then right click and "Mouse - Show Mouse" to show mouse, then follow that up with a right click "Mouse - Show Mouse" to hide mouse... save project and re-publish, that seems to consistently and completely take care of the bleed issue for that particular publish. It's almost as if that does some sort of re-calibration of the entire project to "fix" any issues. (Makes me wonder if "recalibration" should not be a menu option in Captivate that does whatever it is my workaround does to fix the issue?)

Few comments about my workaround:

I want the mouse hidden on ALL my slides, thus the "show mouse / hide mouse". If your project requires the mouse to exist on all slides, do the opposite.
On projects with many slides, this "show" and "hide" on all slides at once can take a bit of time to complete.
Whenever I "show mouse", the default mouse timing many times lengthens my slide time from what I actually desire. So the very first time I "show mouse", I go thru and manually size them all to 0.1 seconds. Guessing there's probably an easier way to do this, but I got tired of always having to re-adjust my slides after hiding the mouse before publishing.
If your project has mouse visible on some slides and not on others, I have not tried my workaround solution to that. But I'd suspect you'd have to selectively choose slides (instead of CNTL-A) and then "show / hide" or "hide / show" based on whether or not you want the mouse. On big projects, this could be annoying!

I am attaching a screen print to illustrate my issue. I've had two others in my company on different computers that experience this exact same issue. I was a bit surprised to not find more "complaints" about this online as, at least for me, it's more than just a random happening. I am publishing to SWF and HTML5.

I have also noticed a similar thing occuring when using the "MEDIA" publish to an .exe file. In at least one of those cases, my "hide / show mouse" workaround did not seem to work.

At least for me, this was a workaround solution that made using Captivate viable for my needs. Otherwise, due to my large number of projects with many slides, I would have had to investigate and change to a different solution. The "republishing several times" option would have taken too long and also not have provided me comfort knowing my problem was actually fixed on every slide.

Report · Jan 16, 2013

Thanks for the great feedback, I'm going to give your suggestion a try on one of my recent projects that has given me a problem and see how it works out. I was surprised as well that I didn't see more reports of this symptom, doesn't seem like something that would only effect a few users...

Report · Jan 16, 2013

Hi Captivating_Texan and mkjava,

Did either of you play around with compression settings (under Publish Settings, SWF Size and Quality)? I've seen people mention similar problems with backbround images, and often things cleared up if they deselected "Advanced Project Compression" (or if that didn't work, the other compression options as well).

Report · Jan 16, 2013

I brought up one of my projects that's been having this problem, was getting screen bleed thru in 2 different places when viewing in the preview or after publishing. I turned off the Advanced Project Compression, saved the project, and that immediately resolved the issue. The demo ran fine in both preview and after publishing with no bleed thru at all. Assuming this resolves the issue now for me in all cases, it would seem that this option definitely has some bugs! Thanks for the suggestion ElaKat!

Report · Jul 17, 2013

Hi All,

Just for the sake of bringing this up-to-date...

I installed Captivate 7 last night and started using it this morning.

I had the same problem...wrong background bleeding onto a slide somehow.

I tried every solution mentioned in this post and none of it helped in my case.

Finally, I just captured the entire slide image that i wanted in Snagit...pasted it onto the bad slides...and then merged it into the background.

This is kind of a brute force solution, but it worked and I only had two slides that were acting funny.

Thanks,

Joe

Report · Mar 02, 2016

I'm in Captivate 9 and am still having this problem with one particular project. This same project is also having problems "merging" images into the background which make screen captures on top of existing backgrounds to "fix" the screen bleed issue. Any new updates to help?

Thanks,

Janet

Report · Jun 29, 2016

I'm using Captivate 9, and having this same issue on a couple slides from a project I'm working on. I've tried everything that's been suggested here, but the problem persists.

I believe I can work around this issue by recapturing part of the simulation a inserting it on the original project, but this is far from a decent solution, specially since I may be unable to repeat the capture in future projects.

Thanks,

JP

Report · Jun 29, 2016

So just to confirm:

You have turned off all compression options in Preferences (including Advanced Project Compression) and after republishing you still get this issue?