Inserted swf playback is choppy

[Myra Ferguson]

I'm using Presenter 7.0.2. I've created an animation in Flash (at 30 fps and output for Flash Player 6) that gets inserted onto one of the slides. When the swf on the slide plays, it's very choppy. The original swf plays back fine when not inserted in Presenter. Any ideas how to make the animation play correctly in a Presenter presentation?

Here are some things I've tried without any luck:

Publishing options

• Publishing to my computer (output is a swf)
• Publishing to PDF

Animation options

• Using classic tweens
• Using the new motion timeline
• Converting the entire animtion to keyframes

Thanks,

Myra

[BillG-Seattle]

I've worked successfully before with inserted swf files and they have played fine. But on my latest project, I am encountering the same exact problems..the main problem is that some (and only some) animations skip/jerk as they enter the screen.  They even seem to reverse play a bit (for a frame or two). Like you, they play fine as stand-alone swfs.

[BillG-Seattle]

My workaround is to include a streaming sound file in the swf file that lasts the length of the animation. For some reason, the visual choppiness/skipping then stops when its played in Presenter (although the audio itself skips at the end...which I fix by adding a couple seconds of silence at the end of the audio).

[Guest]

Im having the exact same problem - I did notice that its limited to only when I have presenter control the presentation via the playbar.

I tried just inserting audio into my swf file - but still have the same issue.

You said your workaround is to add a streaming sound file - Im assuming you just mean add normal audio to the swf correct?

[Guest]

Myra,

I recently responded to a post similar to this one.   Have you looked at this thread yet: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/493316?tstart=0

I've seen instances where inserted SWF files "stutter" when played back in Presenter content....even though things look and behave correctly when the SWF file is played back in its own environment.  And although I'm not entirely sure why it happens, I think there's some sort of timing glitch, or perhaps some communication error between Presenter and inserted SWF files, even though the SWF may have been set to run at 30fps.

What does seem to be consistent, however, is that SWF files appear to "stutter" more often when they're controlled by the Presenter playback component.  Bottom line, in the thread that I posted to (link above), the solution I came up with was to eliminate 1 second from the duration of EITHER the Flash file OR from the slide that the SWF file is on.  Where you need to eliminate one second's worth of time is going to be dependant on what you have going on in each area, but give that a shot and let me know if you end up with better results than what you're experiencing right now.

Rob

http://www.robrode.com/yabb/

[Myra Ferguson]

The animations are still choppy, but I think there's some minor improvement. (It may be wishful thinking.) But now that we're doing more of these, it looks like there still isn't a clear answer for why this is happening and what to do about it.

My animations are:

• 30 fps
• Set for Actionscript 2 (I have also tried output as Actionscript 1)
• targeting Flash Player 6
• have at least one added second (longer than the audio added to the PPT slide) in the timeline to allow for any time compression
• have an audio file of silence in the swf

I'm curious about the time compression idea. I wonder if there is a formula for how much it is getting compressed to account for varying lengths--should I set more at the end for longer ones or just add 30 frames? Most of my slides are less than a minute. Only one is over. But all of them with inserted swfs are choppy.

[Guest]

I don't think that there's a clear and standard "formula" for tackling this.  For me, it's been more of trial and error...with a lot of error more than success.  All I can tell you is that I've been playing around with this for some time and things have (or seem to have) improved overall.  And based on what you just wrote, setting the anims back to AS 1.0 isn't an issue here.

One thing that I've recently noticed is that the elimination of "stuttering" has been reduced greatly when the animation time ends on what I'll call a "perfect second".  Meaning, that if you build an animation in Flash, it's very easy to end up with something like 26.3 seconds or 38.6 seconds and so on.

What I've been doing lately is make sure that the end of the flash timeline ends on a whole second without any remainder (so that tenths of a second don't happen).  One other note: since downloading the 7.0.5 patch several months ago, this issue has been less of a problem overall....or at least that's been my experience thus far.

So again, I wish (for the sake of everyone) that there was a standard formula for dealing with this issue, and who knows....maybe the 7.0.6 release addresses this problem as well.  But short of that, it's still going to be an experimental situation.

Rob

http://www.robrode.com/yabb/

[Myra Ferguson]

Yay! It's much smoother now! I ran the updater. Now using 7.0.6 build 7604.