Captivate movie audio echo when published

[Phil Zenner]

I inserted an SWF flash movie made with Captivate. It plays fine until published. At that point it creates a strong echo in the audio, regardless of whether I publish at Web or at CD quality.

Update: I've noticed that the echo disappears if I set the "Synchronization" option to "Movie plays independently of slide", or if I display the movie in the presenter panel instead of the slide.

[daveperso]

Hi Phil,

This a known issue and just affects Captivate 4 in both Presenter 5 and Presenter '09. Captivate 3 content does play fine.

Regards

[sbwilliams]

We are having this issue as well, but it is also happening when we play the Captivate file in a seperate window. Any ideas on how to work around this?

[Phil Zenner]

This appears to be a bug in the way that Captivate version 4 and Articulate interact.

There are three workarounds that you might want to try;

1) Don't have two Captivate version 4 movies playing back to back (put a regular Presenter/PowerPoint slide in between).

2) If the above doesn't work or is impractical, then Instead of synchronizing the movie with the slide, have it play automatically with a one second delay. Note that in that event, you may have to work around Presenter's default auto-advance time (usually 4 seconds) for going to the next slide before the Captivate movie is finished. To do this, I insert a dummy animation (it doesn't appear since it is covered up by the Captivate movie). This makes Presenter think there is valid slide content to wait for, and I can then insert an audio silence that is slightly longer than the Captivate movie (I also have to allow for preload time on web publishing).

3) A much more straightforward workaround is to simply drop back to Captivate version 3 until Articulate or Adobe gets this issue resolved.

Good luck!
Phil

[Phil Zenner]

There are two points regarding the "workarounds" to the Captivate v4 audio echo issue that I've found need to be clarified:

1) The workaround of opening a separate browser window to display the Captivate movie I've found doesn't always work - it USUALLY works - sometimes the echo persists even in a separate browser window.

2) As for the second workaround (embedding the movie in the slide, but not synchronizing it), that ALWAYS works to suppress echo, BUT, not surprisingly, creates (by definition) synchronization problems between the slide and the movie. Depending on the speed of the internet connection, the load on the LMS, etc., etc., the allotted slide time for the movie to complete may be too short (causing the movie to abort), or too long (causing the learner to be navigationally confused between Internet delays and slide delays).

Bottom line, I believe that current workarounds are inadequate, the issue is serious, and deserves very high priority from Articulate (regardless of whether that time is spent attempting to get Adobe's attention, developing better workarounds within Articulate, etc.)

[Justin]

Originally Posted by Phil Zenner

There are two points regarding the "workarounds" to the Captivate v4 audio echo issue that I've found need to be clarified:

1) The workaround of opening a separate browser window to display the Captivate movie I've found doesn't always work - it USUALLY works - sometimes the echo persists even in a separate browser window.

2) As for the second workaround (embedding the movie in the slide, but not synchronizing it), that ALWAYS works to suppress echo, BUT, not surprisingly, creates (by definition) synchronization problems between the slide and the movie. Depending on the speed of the internet connection, the load on the LMS, etc., etc., the allotted slide time for the movie to complete may be too short (causing the movie to abort), or too long (causing the learner to be navigationally confused between Internet delays and slide delays).

Bottom line, I believe that current workarounds are inadequate, the issue is serious, and deserves very high priority from Articulate (regardless of whether that time is spent attempting to get Adobe's attention, developing better workarounds within Articulate, etc.)

1. When a movie opens in a new browser window it should play independently of Presenter so should not be affected by this issue. If you have a project where you can duplicate this please submit a case so we can review. Please create an Articulate Presenter package, then upload the zip file to our server. You can review how to do this here:

Send to Articulate Presenter Package - Articulate Presenter ’09 Help

Upload the resulting zip file from your computer to our server using this upload form:

Articulate Support - Upload Your Files for Review

Please be sure to include a description of your issue, your version of PowerPoint, version of Windows and version of Presenter '09 which you can find in Help and Support -> About Articulate Presenter.

2. You need to have the slide advance by user, not automatically.

[tloh]

Hi Justin,

I have been working with AP for a while and it is an awsome tool for authoring beautiful interactive presentations. However, I would like to echo Phil's concerns.

The audio echo issue is severe and renders the content unusable.

Even if content without audio is imported into the presentation, the progress bar functionality is broken and the user no-longer has navigational control within the slide.

There are workarounds but at a huge cost to the end-user experience and does not showcase the seemless interactive environment that we have come to expect of what Articulate can provide.

We are currently deciding on whether to upgrade to the latest version of AP '09 and this is a huge concern. Will there be a fix available for this issue? If so, when will it become available?

I look forward to your response. Thanks!

Sincerely,
Tzuliang

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Software specs:
Windows XP Pro, Version 2002, Service Pack 3
PowerPoint 2007, Version 12.0.6307.5000
Articulate Presenter '09, Version 6.1.903.321 (eval copy)
Adobe Captivate, Version 4.0.0, Build 1596

[daveperso]

Hi tloh,

We recognize that many Articulate users are also users of Captivate and better integration between the two would be better for everyone. This incompatibility has been caused by a change in Captivate 4, not in Articulate. The echoing occurs specifically with Captivate 4 movies in both Presenter 5 and Presenter '09 . There are no issues when importing Captivate 3 and our developers are aware of the issue.

In my testing, I did find that removing the autostart function in Captivate resolves the echoing in Presenter. However, the movie still needs to be played independently of the slide so control of the movie is not available as it was in Captivate 3.

Another possibility is to import Captivate 4 movies as web objects, or as multiple-file projects ie. import the Captivate skin and control the movie with the Captivate player within Articulate. This article looks at how you can do that.

Regards

[tloh]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your very thoughtful and prompt reply.

As mentioned earlier, the articulate interface is great and we want to be able to use just that to allow the user to navigate through the presentation. It is clunky to need to rely on another navigation interface and can even confuse users.

Our flash videos can be rather long and unfortunately, it is not feasible to split it up due to the nature of the content. Therefore it is critical for users to be able to navigate through the material smoothly.

I am still evaluating the compatibility of AP'09 and C3. They didn't play nice together last I looked but take a second pass and post when I have more information.

I understand that this issue was introduced with Captivate 4 and I actually can empathize with you having to deal with the incompatibilities introduced by a third party (worked in tech support previously). However, the flash movie published by Captivate does work as intended and the issues are only introduced after importing into Articulate.

What is the likelyhood that a fix will be available in the next update release?

Thanks!

~ Tzuliang

[jtbickle]

Ahhh...Flash and Audio. Years of struggle.

I have successfully imported Captivate 4 .swf without the echo. In your Captivate4 source file, simply add a 3 second blank loading slide with no audio. I added a animated "loading..." to give the .swf a few seconds to load. Users are comfortable with brief load screens, so this work well.

The autostart works fine, and you can sync the .swf with the Articulate movie.

Hope that helps.

jB