Strange audio editing programs

Question

Hi, I didn't see my problems already brought up so I am
hoping someone can help.
We are using Captivate to record narrated 'tours' of
websites, with the narrators not being the editors (so it is
difficult to get them to follow what should work best). We have had
to work with continuous audio (3-5 minutes)- it could be divided
into clips, but because of background and 'white noise' it sounds
wrong if there is any pure silence. Also, they are often clicking
on several things without slowing down their speech - this all
means that timing is very important.
I have not been using Captivate long but I am finding it very
frustrating to edit the audio because of several issues. The
computer is new and has little on it, and seems to run it all fine
without RAM or virtual memory problems or slowdown. Because of
timing adjustments I have been doing all this editing in the long,
full-length waveform audio editor.
1. I have no idea why, but bits of silence show up at some
point while I'm editing (deleting some audio and moving slide
markers), often in the middle of words. I don't think it's the
issue of adding more space to the end of a slide to conserve
minimum length, because it seems to occur in the middle of slides,
but this could be confused by:
2. After moving slide markers in an earlier portion of the
slide, all the later slide markers have sometimes moved as well.
This doesn't seem consistent but sometimes it makes everything
quite off. This wouldn't really be a problem except it means I am
only free to work beginning to end and not at whichever place I am
ready for. I saw this mentioned in another topic and I am really
hoping someone knows of a box I can tick to say "don't
automatically move slide markers for any reason without asking me
first" - it is maddening to make a change at slide 19 and have
everything after that be off.
3. Sometimes, when deleting the bits of silence, it will
delete them with no problem. Sometimes though, Captivate refuses to
delete them. It has nothing to do with slide length as I have
tested in on slides that are much longer than their minimum. Saving
what other changes I've made and coming back into the timing editor
also doesn't seem to work, it still won't delete them. Sometimes if
I highlight a larger area around them, it will delete part of the
larger area, but not usually the silent part. I have had to go into
the original files and mess with exporting/importing/re-editing the
bit of audio to get what I wanted in some cases.
4. Sometimes, when deleting a big of silence, in addition to
not deleting it, it moves my slide markers off by as much as 40
seconds. Say I am deleting a bit of mysterious-origin silence in
slide 39. After I highlight it and click X, the markers for slides
29 and 30 jump into view and slide 39 is way down at the end of the
presentation. There have been a few times I didn't catch this
before I clicked 'ok' and having to re-time everything because of
it is infuriating.
5. 1 in 7 or 8 times I edit audio, and click OK, it doesn't
save any of my changes. I don't get the 'rebuilding mp3s' screen
and all my changes are lost. Also maddening. There doesn't seem to
be a pattern as far as what changes I've made, how long the program
has been open, what other things might be running on the computer,
etc. It just does it sometimes.
These may not all be exactly what's happening, as I had a
hard time troubleshooting them - if I am looking at a portion of
the timeline and changes are happening elsewhere I don't know
about, they are hard to catch. I only could tell that every time I
made changes, I had to make other changes because of it, some of
them worse than others. I hope someone can tell me what is going on
and why Captivate seems to be acting so bizarrely for me.

Answer 1

I'd be interested to hear the sort of background noise you
are experiencing. It might be possible to remove this using
Adobe Audition
as for silence or dead air, you could get around this by removing
the silence at the beginning of your audio files and moving the
sound object on the Timeline to 0.5 sec marker.
Voice-over is an art form that can take a long time to
perfect. One thing I would suggest is that you provide your
narrators with a script and make sure they rehearse it before
recording the narrative. This can go a long way to prevent the sort
of problems you have listed in your post.
quote:
At any rate it is impossible at this point for us to build the
presentations with individual sound clips - because of background
noise, any silence or dead air (like at the beginning of slides)
makes it sound really terrible. We also have inexperienced
narrators who aren't slowing down to click, and who aren't at hand
to re-record content. We need to go in and edit out the 'ums' and
'I meant to says' as well as fix the timing on some slides (and
rebuild backgrounds it didn't capture during recording). I'd edit
audio within each slide rather than in the audio timing editor but
that creates silence problems, etc.
HTH
Regards,
Mark
Adobe Community Expert