Timing PowerPoint Animations

[Stoker10]

I've just imported a PowerPoint presentation into Captivate 3. Most of the 25 slides have bullet-point advances and other animations built in to them. The live presenter advances the animations manually, as she talks to the slides. I've got her voice recorded, and want to trigger the animations in time with the audio. Does Cap 3 allow me to do this? It doesn't seem so.
thanks!

[Jorma_at_CoSo]

I believe that this feature is part of Adobe Presenter (an add-in for PPT). This audio timing is an easy feature of that product.

Jorma@RealEyes

[Stoker10]

Thank you, Jorma. I'll try that approach. I don't see any solution within Captivate 3.

[CatBandit]

Hi folks!

Actually, not only can Captivate do this, Captivate has no trouble doing it. Just to correct one possible misunderstanding, you wouldn't time the audio to the animations, you would time the animations to the audio (on Captivate's slide-timeline) - the distinction is not a small one.

Adobe Presenter is actually a small feather from the Adobe "Connect" bird. It does allow you to organize and present Power Point files, including the addition of audio and other bells and whistles for presentations. It even presents itself - in the marketing hype - as an alternative to Captivate, but In fact, "Presenter" is closer to being a competitor with Articulate's "Presenter" package.

http://www.articulate.com/
http://www.adobe.com/products/presenter/

Whether it is more right for you than Captivate is up to you, but the decision shouldn't be made because you think Captivate "can't do that", because of course, it not only can, but is quite often used that way.

BTW, Adobe Presenter can be used to display PPTs or Captivate SWFs with equal ease. But again, whether you would want to use it for one, or the other, or neither, is quite another matter entirely, and would depend on a large number of factors.
.

[Stoker10]

quote:

---

Originally posted by: CatBandit


"Actually, not only can Captivate do this, Captivate has no trouble doing it. Just to correct one possible misunderstanding, you wouldn't time the audio to the animations, you would time the animations to the audio (on Captivate's slide-timeline) - the distinction is not a small one."

Just to add to my previous message, in Captivate I cannot "see" the animations on the slide-timeline. I just see the entire slide as a captured animation. I'd love to hear more about how to do this. Thank you, all!

[Oxford25]

CatBandit-

I can see how this would be simple if the animations were imported and displayed on the timeline separately. However, since they are displayed as a single animation, it seems impossible to always get the corresponding audio to play at the correct time (the animations appear too fast for the audio). The only way I can see how to slow them down is to edit the animations in PowerPoint and tweak the delay between them, which is not really practical. Could you elaborate on what you posted before, and is this even possible in Captivate 3? Thanks for the help!

[Claire_Allam]

Hello CatBandit - Tell how! I cannot see how to do it, since the individual bullet points do not appear on on the timeline to be dragged around. This is a bit of a pants (rubbish) way to do it anyway, since it means you have post-produce each bullet point.. Life is too short. Articulate does it brilliantly!
For most people who do presentations, you want to step through your pres. and speak to each bullet point, and for that to remain in sync.

[ksus]

I can get recorded PPT presentations that have animations on slides to import into Captivate 3. These presentations are recorded with audio and the resulting Captivate slides do show the animation. Howerver, the animations in Captivate all happen one after the other with no delays; whereas, the recorded PPT presentation had delays in animations that were advanced via mouse clicks.

As I look at the resulting Captivate SWF slides there appears to be no way to change the fact the animations all happen one after another so I could not "retime" my audio to coordinate with the Captivate animation.

Am I missing something? I appreciate feedback.

[Stoker10]

Hello, again. My experience is still like that described by Dr. B. I'd like to thank CatBandit for your reply, but can you say more about the actual steps you'd take to achieve your result? Thank you.

Like Dr. B, I cannot seem to change the timing of a triggered animation within a Captivate slide. When my SME spoke to the slide deck, she'd trigger an animation that might have three or four moves all triggered by the one mouse click. If she varied in her timing while it played live, it seemed like no big deal. But in a self-paced way, if her voice doesn't line up perfectly with the animations, then it's too confusing to look at.

[CatBandit]

Hi guys! My apologies for not responding - when I first posted, I forgot to "Subscribe" to this topic, so I wasn't getting any notification of your posts. With that out of the way, I DID misunderstand the original question. So to avoid having too much egg on my face, I started experimenting to see if I could actually accomplish this ... and yes, it can be done.

The question is actually "How do we pause and restart an animation object?" (to sync it with the audio on that slide). The answer is in duplicating the click-box on that slide. Let's see if I can put it into steps for you:
================================================

With the audio inserted, and the PPT animation object on the slide ...

1) Click the slide preview button (below and to the left of the timeline)
... or ...
........... 1a) Grab the slide Playhead (the red bar) and "scrub" the timeline
........... 1b) If it's not visible, click the top of the time-line on the "seconds" bar

2) Watch/Listen for the point you need to insert a stop, and "Pause" there

3) Insert a new click-box at that point on the time-line (and stop the 1st one here)

4) Continue from that point, once again pausing when required by audio
......... 4a) or watch the bullets as they appear and sync to that if you wish

5) Again, insert another new click-box at that point (stopping the prior one at the same time-line point)

================================================
Continue as required. There is some work involved, but if you play with this a little, you'll find that it can be done easily and accurately. The trick is as simple as stopping playback with multiple click-boxes at the points you want to pause. When done, you will as many click-boxes as you have bullets or other transitions on the slide; just be sure none of the click-boxes overlap.

This is an answer to a different problem than I originally thought, but I hope it it helpful. Again, I apologize for not "subscribing" to the topic after my original reply. Usually I do that with every post, but "stuff happens".

Ciao ~
.

[docedoc]

Larry,

I must say, "That's clever". I've been pondering the situation and thinking, no way. Thanks for thinking up that trick -- could come in handy some time.

Phil

[CatBandit]

Thanks Phil, for the thought. Hope it serves you and others well.

In honesty, my favorite solutions are those that are thought not to exist.


Thanks again.
.

[DTSAGGIE72]

OK I am late to the party here. I have followed your instructions. And while it does give me the same number of click boxes as points, however I do not seem to be able to alter the length of time that it takes to display the points.

How does one change the length of time between the points? I must be missing something here...

[Guest]

I must say that I'm with DTSAggie on this one. I've followed the instructions but can't see how to sync up the appearance of individual bullets with specific points in the audio narration. I want the bullets to appear one at a time as they are spoken about, and to not require a user click to advance.
CatBandit (or anyone else who has gotten this to work), can you please help?!
Thanks!

[DTSAGGIE72]

I was not able to successfully import the powerpoint into Captivate for at least two reasons.
1. The import reduced the quality of the graphics that were in the presentation to an unacceptable level.
2. The timing of the imported animations could not be altered. Nothing that anyone in these forums suggested had a positive impact on that.

There are two alternatives in my limited experience.
1. Time the powerpoint completely prior to import so that there is no need to change the the timing of the slide. For there is no way to do that once the presentation has been imported.
2. Use powerpoint to rough out your presentation and then create it directly in Captivate. This is, in my view, the only alternative if you have graphic images that you wish to show in your presentation or if you anticipate the need to edit the timing or add to the presentation in the future.

The results are great. It is tedious. The Powerpoint import is not as advertised.

[CatBandit]

georgiegreg, I've sent you a PM (private message). If you wish, use the link provided and I'll take a look at your file. If we can get it fixed the way you want it, we (you) can report back here so others know what was done. If we cannot get it working the way you wish, we will at least have done our (my) best, and we will know that you should reach out to others, or give up the idea as un-doable. Fair?
~best~
Larry

[jgreen1024]

I've got a related but different problem. I set up animations in Powerpoint to start after x number of seconds. After importing, it looks like the animation timing was preserved, and in fact if I play a slide back in the Edit tab, the animation shows correctly and at the correct time. But when I produce the final video, or if I look at a preview of the final product, the animation never happens.

Any ideas? Looks to me like a product bug.. If I pay $39 to open a support case do I get some assurance that it'll get fixed? :)

[CatBandit]

HI jgreen1024,

First, I wouldn't recommend that you pay $39 for a ticket. But if you do, I wouldn't tell you to expect to get much "real" value, on a ticket like the one you are posing. The reason is, they are going to tell you it just can't be helped. And they are probably right, for most intents and purposes.

It can be problematic when you try to synchronize the internal animation on any animated slide with other objects on that slide ... and for the very reasons you and others mention. The animation doesn't really exist on the time-line like other objects do.

And viewing animation on a single-slide basis will often "fool you" because when it is published and seen with the activity on slides before and after it, the timing is rarely what it seemed to be when viewed by itself.

I just wouldn't want to try what you are doing with animated PPT files, given the current state of development of Captivate's interactions with those PPTs.

Off the top, have you ever tried using Star Office 8? It has a Power Point wannabee that isn't as full featured, but at $69 you get the entire suite - a "Writer", an "Excel" look-alike spreadsheet, and a Power point-like app, all of which do a great job, and all of which can open documents created by their counterparts in the MS Office Suite (although they do have disclaimers stating that some functions might be lost). You can develop content in the PPT look-alike called "Impress", and then save it as a PPT file and bring that into Captivate. Just thinking out loud, but I use "Star Office 8" all the time and enjoy it for its simplicity.

Have a good weekend ...
Larry

[jgreen1024]

What I don't understand about that point is that the animation timing DID get imported properly. When I go through the slide inside Captivate in the Edit function, the transitions are right there. I set an animation to happen 30 seconds into the slide, and right at 30 seconds in the edit view, the view changes.

However, if I go to record audio, I noticed that 30 second transition didn't appear until 40 seconds in. The next transition should be 45 seconds later - when recording audio, it shows up 60 seconds later. So the import happened, Captivate knows about the correct timings, it's just screwing them up during recording. My guess is that some timer is running in slow motion.

I guess next I'll try to fool it by setting the animation to run faster than I want it and see if that works. But it would be nice if this got fixed.

[jgreen1024]

Well, success of sorts. I set the 30 second transition to happen at 23 seconds, and the 45 second transition to happen at about 35 seconds, and through trial and error got it to come out OK in the end. Not the best but at least the final product looks OK. Hope they fix this one.

[anniekrs]

ok, yeah...I've been following these threads and it doesn't work for me. My project is even simpler in that I don't have audio, just blocks of text or bullet points I want to appear at the click of the mouse.

I've tried delaying the appearance of the text in my ppt. slide and implemented the click box idea. The project just will not stop and wait for the click to continue.

So from what I've gathered, importing ppt slides with animation is pointless. If you want your text to animate on demand, you're better off creating the slide in Captivate rather than importing ppt. Right????

[DTSAGGIE72]

Anniekrs - My experience has been that the import just is not worth the hassle. The learning curve on creating the presentation directly in Captivate is not steep enough to merit fooling with the PPT import. You have much more control and richer options creating directly in Captivate. It makes good sales literature, it just does not work.

[ksus]

For what it's worth...

I too have found the PPT import of animations worthless. Here is the basics of my work around, not elegant but it does work.

Create PPTs as usual. Add animations, etc.

Open a new Captivate project. And choose Software Simulation and Full Screen. I temporarily set my screen resolution to 800x600 as that is the size of the project I desire. If you want higher resolution, by all means use what you want. You may want to turn off recording of the cursor, etc. so they don't show

I step through my PPT presentation in slide show mode (full screen) with animations, recording my audio commentary, etc. You do not have to do the whole thing at once you can do parts of it and append it to your Captivate project. Hit a few manual captures before you start to give you some slides you can remove if necessary from the start.

Stop Captivate recording when the presentation (or the part you want to record) is done. Save your Captivate file and change your screen resolution back to what you normally use.

Now when you look at your Captivate file, it will be sized at 800x600.

Also, you may find for some animations that you need to turn on/off full motion recording using F9/F10 but mostly animations work fine.

Hope this helps.

[CatBandit]

Thank you Dr. B.. A solid but imaginative solution, at least for a portion of the problems. For what its worth, and knowing its no help, I too believe that it is easier and more effective to just create the PPT animation effects inside Captivate ... then to frustrate yourself trying to fit the square peg that is the Power Point animation into the round hole that is Captivate's audio and timeline.

Have a good day, and again, thanks Dr. B.
~regards,
Larry

[R_O_S_E]

I too found problems with importing PowerPoint animations (bullets added in ) with associated sound into Captivate 3. The timing was way off--double the original. The sound didn't sync.

This is what I ended up doing and so far it seems like its going to do the job, although I haven't published it yet. Its kind of an old fashioned way of achieving animation through a series of successive stills.

Create a copy of the original powerpoint and remove any animations and sound. In the new file, for each slide with bullets I made duplicates (Ctrl+D) and then edited the slides so that Slide1A had 1 bullet, Slide1B had 2 bullets, Slide 1C had 3 bullets and so on. I had to turn off the autosize feature on the slides so that the text would not resize when I deleted the bullets. Otherwise this idea wouldn't work.

I then looked into the original timings in the original powerpoint and made notes of the animation timings to give me an idea of how they synced with the voice over and how much time was required for each slide.

I imported the revised (no animations, automatic advance) Powerpoint into Captivate. I changed the slide length for each of the slides to be very long in order to accomodate the sound for each group of slides (Slide 1A,1B,1C). This possibly wasn't required but didnt want to try to add a large audio file to a short slide. So I then added the audio wav file for the old PowerPoint slide 1 into Slide 1A and listened to it to only include the text relevant for the first bullet and cut everything else. I then resized the timing of this slide to match the length of the sound bite. I repeated the process for Slide 1B etc.

I found when previewing the project, there was a flashing in the transition with 'No Transition', so I changed it all to Wipe and this gave the appearance of the bullets coming in one at a time even though they were on multiple slides.

Rose