Friday, July 17, 2009

Fixing Captivate Slowdown

Quick note on a problem i've encountered with Adobe Captivate.

It's seems that when working with some larger simulations with audio my captivate files become increasingly large in filesize and in turn cause the program to run very slowly.

I'm certain that this is because I was doing a lot of editing with the internal audio editor (cutting/pasting and moving slide cues around). Anyways there is a way to quickly solve the issue:

(Note: I suggest saving a backup of your file prior to this, not that anything could possibly go wrong....)

1. In the advanced audio options, choose to export your audio as one mp3.

2. In the advanced audio options, delete all the audio from your slides.

3. Run Captivate again so you have two windows, create a new blank project.

4. Copy all your slides from your project and paste into the blank project.

5. Import the exported mp3 on the first slide and choose to "Retain Current Slide Timing and distribute audio files over several slides"

6. Save your new smaller quicker project and get back to work!

2 comments:

  1. Any ideas on how to combat Captivate slowdown when you have linked (not embedded) videos? Our finished files are around 77 MB. Our upload time is very slow.

    We have already tried setting to Preload to 20%. We may try to compress our vids more and maybe reduce the size of the video windows.

    Any thoughts on this?

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  2. Would love to help out, but not sure I understand the problem completely, can't find any contact information for you Leslie, so feel free to shoot me an email so I can help!

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