Cap3 – Audio corruption problems

Question

[Running Captivate 3 on Windows XP Pro]
In the project I’m working on, I’ve captured all
the slides I need, and have built up my narration audio by adding
.wav clips as I go along. I’ve been using the Edit Audio
Timing display to sync the next series of slides to each audio clip
I add.
PROBLEM:
The project was running approx. 70 MB (50 individual slide
events). After importing my last audio clip, I was in the process
of syncing it to the remaining slides in my show. ... But while
previewing my timing, I found that at slide cut points going almost
to the beginning of my project, short silences were inserted
intermittently, and just as often, syllables were dropped or
duplicated from my voice-over, again, at slide cut points. In some
cases, the inserted silences were impossible to delete. These
problems cropped up in segments that were fine previously.
The rework has been extremely painful. … I decided to
cut up the project into smaller movies, prove them out, then
concatenate the pieces. This seems to be working okay. In the
meantime, I also purged my libraries of unused objects.
I’ve noted that in trying to remedy this situation,
I’ve deleted a clip from the timeline, and re-imported it.
When this happens, I get an alert asking whether I wish to create a
duplicate of the clip or not. It’s clear that just because
you delete a clip from the timeline, it remains in the library. Is
my poor library maintenance a potential cause of this garbling?
What’s going on? ... Would greatly appreciate any best
practices info.

Answer 1

Hi Myron
What you are describing sounds as if you had your Captivate
movie part recorded, then brought in a narration that was about as
long as the project and used the option to choose where the audio
was split up.
While I'm not saying it's desired behavior and we shouldn't
worry about it happening, it would seem to make sense that
Captivate is somehow inadvertently inserting the short silences.
I would think that an easy way to avoid this happening is by
taking a different approach to recording audio narration. For
starters, try to avoid thinking in terms of the whole project.
Think at the slide level. When you record narration, instead of
recording a long narration, record just the narration for the
individual slide. Then move to the next slide in the recording
dialog and record the next. The key factor in this is to avoid
allowing Captivate to manipulate your audio.
Just a thought... Rick