Audio and other Bugs in 2.0 - are they fixed in 3.0?

Question

I just completed creating an e-learning course using
Captivate 2.0 that used quite a lot of graphics and video. The
numbers of bugs I experienced when publishing to Flash in 2.0 were
so substantial that the delivery date had to be delayed almost two
months, much to the unhappiness of the client. I'll list the most
frustrating problems and hopefully someone can tell me if these
issues were fixed in 3.0. It's difficult for me to justify an
upgrade if I'm going to run into the same horrible problems.
I will start out by stating that I keep my project files
under 20 slides and all the slides have audio. The slides are 800 x
500 and none of the animations/video I'm using are more than 20
secs long. I'm running Captivate 2.0 on a Dell laptop with an Intel
Core 2 Duo, running Windows XP (with all the updates) and with 1 GB
of RAM. I've upped my Virtual Memory to 5 GB. My machine meets all
the specifications listed for Captivate 2.0, but I suspect that one
really needs a much faster machine with a lot more memory to work
at anything other than a snail's pace. I also make sure that no
unused graphics or animations are left in a project's library and I
defrag my hard drive at least once a day (if I don't Captivate
crashes everytime I try and open or save a file).
Problems:
- It takes up to 15 minutes to open or close a file. It
doesn't matter how big the file is. And the more files I open and
close in Captivate in any session, the slower my machine gets and I
evenutally have to restart it. It also takes 10-15 minutes to save
some of my project files, whose sizes have ballooned for no reason
(see below). If Captivate crashes during the save or even right
after a file is saved, the file is corrupted and cannot be opened.
I've had to redo work two or three times because of this problem.
- A project file with 10 multiple choice quiz questions and
two other simple slides (and only one brief audio file) is over 1
GB in size. I can't have more than 10 quiz questions because the
file sizes get so large that the program crashes before I can save
the file. I also have a number of 3-slide projects with graphics,
no animations, and some audio that are over 1 GB in size. But then
I have 20-slide project files with a lot of video and graphics and
audio that never go above 200 MB. In fact, all my project file file
sizes seem enormous for no good reason. And it's not from orphan
files in the Library. It's going to take like 10 DVDs to turn over
all my project files (about 40 project files - all under 20 slides
each) to the client. It's ridiculous!
- If I import audio as a WAV file and then publish the
project to Flash, the audio either moves to different slides or one
audio file gets repeated in all the slides. The only way to fix
this is to convert all the .WAV files to .MP3 files (but at a very
low bit rate), delete all the old WAV files from the project, and
replace them with the MP3 files. Using a WAV file always leads to
major audio scrambling when I publish to Flash.
- If I use a .MP3 audio file with a higher bit rate, when I
publish to Flash, the audio is slowed down by about 50%.
- Graphics fail to show up in the .SWF file after a publish
to Flash. This is entirely random and different graphics are
affected each publish, so I never know what the published file will
look like.The only way to fix this is to go back to the Project
file, double click on the graphic and make a change to one of the
options, save the change, reopen the graphic and change the option
back to the one you started with. Then cross your fingers that
another graphic won't vanish during the Publish process.
- Objects that I have fading in and out on the timeline work
perfectly in the project file, but when they are published as Flash
output, the timings are all off by up to 15 seconds. This happens
on a couple of slides and I can find no explanation or way to fix
this. And it's completely random. One publish may have the timings
out of whack and the next one has the timings correct.
- Adding any animation to a project file causes all drop-down
menus to stop functioning. I see from other posts that I just need
to click on an object in the Library. Wish I had known about that
sooner. I ended up restarting Captivate a lot.
- After closing Captivate, it takes 15 minutes or more before
my machine works at anything like it's normal speed. If I try to
shut down my machine right after closing Captivate, I get an error
message telling me Captivate is still running. It appears that
Captivate does not release memory after it is closed. I have to
restart my machine everytime I close Captivate just so I can
continue working in other applications normally.
These are just the major problems which caused the most
headaches and delays. Most of it seems to be the VERY buggy publish
to Flash option and some problems with releasing memory.
I know a lot of other people have experienced these problems,
as I've read about them in other posts. Has Capitvate 3 fixed any
of these issues? There is no way I'd ever attempt another
e-learining project with Captivate 2. This one about killed me.
Thanks,
Jim

Answer 1

Thanks to everyone who has responded and tried to help.
Unfortunately, none of suggestions have worked.
Here's the update:
- All my files are local, so the business about working on
network drives is not applicable.
- I tried the Save As option to try and decrease my huge file
sizes as suggested by a couple of people. I did a Save As to
another file name, then deleted the original file and did another
Save As from the renamed file back to the original file name. My
file sizes INCREASED each time I saved. I now have a 12 slide
projects file with multiple choice quiz questions, no video,
minimal graphics and audio that tops out over 1.1 GB.
- I can't copy slides from one file to a new file because the
file I want to copy slides from is so large that Captivate crashes
everytime I try to Import slides from another project.
- No one has mentioned anything about all the bizarre, random
things that happen to graphics and audio when you publish to Flash.
This is by far the most frustrating aspects of working with
Captivate 2.0 - there is no telling what will turn up in your .SWF
file and whether the audio will be on the correct slide. I've seen
several posts about the problems using WAV files for audio or about
MP3 files being slowed down in the SWF files but no one can say if
these problems have been fixed in 3.0. Likewise the disappearing
graphics and the inexplicable timeline delays when publishing from
my Project file to an SWF file. And now a new one has popped up: in
the SWF file, the screen size suddenly gets smaller on several
slides, then goes back to normal!
- It sounds like I need a lot more memory and faster machine
(despite Adobe stating that my machine should be adequate to use
Captivate) to deal with the slow performance, constant crashing,
and frequent corrupted files. But this can't possibly explain the
extreme file bloat and all the Publish errors when creating SWF
files.
At this point there's no way I can upgrade to 3.0 because of
all the problems with 2.0. I can't make a justification to my boss
to spend more money on a software program that (from his
perspective and mine) does not work as advertised and has impacted
this project so dramatically.
It sounds like I'm the only Captivate user who is
experiencing these difficulties, which is really perplexing and
bizarre. Perhaps Captivate and Dell laptops are not compatible? I
sure do wish that Captivate had a Mac version. At least there
wouldn't be the usual Windows software excuse of "it must be your
machine."
Sigh... I sure did want to like Captivate, but everytime I
open the program I get the hebbie jebbies, expecting some new
disaster to befall me.
Jim