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Audio makes your elearning content more engaging and useful to learners. You can add audio to your Adobe Captivate project either by recording yours or somebody else’s voice directly or by inserting a previously recorded audio file (.AVI, .WAV). When you add audio to a slide, it appears as a separate ‘element’ in the timeline. You can synchronize the audio with the slide by adjusting its timeline.
When you publish the project, Adobe Captivate embeds the audio within the output file. The embedded audio can be a single file or multiple files based on the timing and type of audio. Adobe Flash Player that plays the Adobe Captivate movie also plays the audio along with the movie.
Sometimes, you may notice a lag in the audio timing and that it is not synchronized perfectly with the movie. The audio that must ideally end with a slide spills over to the next slide. In this article, let’s examine why such issues occur and how they can be solved.
Why does this issue occur? Before understanding the reason for this issue, let’s first understand how Adobe Captivate publishes audio.
Whenever an audio starts and ends at the same time as that of the slides, Adobe Captivate ‘stitches’ up the audio objects on the contiguous slides into a single file when the project is published.
Suppose the audio on slide 1 runs till the end of the slide as shown below:
Audio spreads till end of slide
The audio on the next slide, slide 2 starts right from the beginning of the slide as shown below:
Audio begins at start of slide
In such a case, the audio files on both the slides are ‘stitched’ and published as a single audio file. Similarly, if all the slides contain audio that start at the same time as that of the slides and spread till the end of slide, Adobe Captivate creates a single audio file in the published output.
Note: If the audio on the contiguous slides are of different types (mono and stereo), Adobe Captivate generates separate audio files for each of the types even if the audio starts and ends at the same time as that of the slides.
Adobe Captivate is designed to do so to logically stitch up users’ narrations that are done during or post-recording of a screen or application. A single audio file helps to keep the continuity in the narration intact.
Adobe Flash Player plays the Captivate published audio and stops only when the specified duration elapses or when you intervene and stop it. Therefore, with a single audio file in an Adobe Captivate movie, the audio and video run parallelly at their own pace resulting in synchronization issues.
Is there a workaround? Yes, a very easy one. Tweak the audio timing in such a way that Adobe Captivate generates and embeds multiple audio files in the output. To do so, extend the duration of the slide a little more than that of the audio. For example, if the current slide and audio duration is 4 seconds, extend the slide duration by another 0.3 seconds, and retain the audio duration at 4 seconds.
The following illustration shows the difference between the audio and the slide duration:
Slide time longer than audio
Now, Adobe Flash player can control the beginning of each audio file at the specified time in the movie.
Audio makes your elearning content more engaging and useful to learners. You can add audio to your Adobe Captivate project either by recording yours or somebody else’s voice directly or by inserting a previously recorded audio file (.AVI, .WAV). When you add audio to a slide, it appears as a separate ‘element’ in the timeline. You can synchronize the audio with the slide by adjusting its timeline.
When you publish the project, Adobe Captivate embeds the audio within the output file. The embedded audio can be a single file or multiple files based on the timing and type of audio. Adobe Flash Player that plays the Adobe Captivate movie also plays the audio along with the movie.
Sometimes, you may notice a lag in the audio timing and that it is not synchronized perfectly with the movie. The audio that must ideally end with a slide spills over to the next slide. In this article, let’s examine why such issues occur and how they can be solved.
Why does this issue occur? Before understanding the reason for this issue, let’s first understand how Adobe Captivate publishes audio.
Whenever an audio starts and ends at the same time as that of the slides, Adobe Captivate ‘stitches’ up the audio objects on the contiguous slides into a single file when the project is published.
Suppose the audio on slide 1 runs till the end of the slide as shown below:
Audio spreads till end of slide
The audio on the next slide, slide 2 starts right from the beginning of the slide as shown below:
Audio begins at start of slide
In such a case, the audio files on both the slides are ‘stitched’ and published as a single audio file. Similarly, if all the slides contain audio that start at the same time as that of the slides and spread till the end of slide, Adobe Captivate creates a single audio file in the published output.
Note: If the audio on the contiguous slides are of different types (mono and stereo), Adobe Captivate generates separate audio files for each of the types even if the audio starts and ends at the same time as that of the slides.
Adobe Captivate is designed to do so to logically stitch up users’ narrations that are done during or post-recording of a screen or application. A single audio file helps to keep the continuity in the narration intact.
Adobe Flash Player plays the Captivate published audio and stops only when the specified duration elapses or when you intervene and stop it. Therefore, with a single audio file in an Adobe Captivate movie, the audio and video run parallelly at their own pace resulting in synchronization issues.
Is there a workaround? Yes, a very easy one. Tweak the audio timing in such a way that Adobe Captivate generates and embeds multiple audio files in the output. To do so, extend the duration of the slide a little more than that of the audio. For example, if the current slide and audio duration is 4 seconds, extend the slide duration by another 0.3 seconds, and retain the audio duration at 4 seconds.
The following illustration shows the difference between the audio and the slide duration:
Slide time longer than audio
Now, Adobe Flash player can control the beginning of each audio file at the specified time in the movie.
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I have a colleague who is trying to record a webinar using Captivate 6 and is also experiencing audio-video sync issues. She is using a ‘Video Demo’ approach and is recording audio and video simultaneously. After previewing the file, her audio soon becomes out of sync with the video for no apparent reason. I advised to publish the video regardless just to see if the issue is rectified post-editing but still the sync problem occurs.
Jestersmith couldn’t have said it better…….. “This program is severly limited in features and usability. I can’t believe my company is using it. Very frustrating.”
For usability it is particularly annoying!
Hi Knight,Have you done any editing on the recorded project?
Hi, I’ve tried several ways to resolve the issue for my colleague to be honest. I’ve tried doing it with no editing on the project and also with editing on the project with no improvement on either. I’ve now had to tell her to record the video without audio and then record the audio separately and import it onto the video. Which is not ideal as it doubles workload.
Hi Mukul, Thanks a million my friend! I was always wondering why resuming from a bookmark repeated audio from earlier slides whereas the on-screen animation synchronized perfectly, whereas some of them didn’t. Now that I know the secret, I went back to those files and found that the slides that had audio stream touching the end of timeline had this issue; others didn’t. This is exactly the solution that I was looking for.
Regards,
Saurabh Gupta
I see I am a little late discovering this problem. I have version 5.0.something. Has it been resolved in Captivate updates?
