import other captivate project slides problem

[whoseywhatsey]

every time i attempt to import slides from other captivate 2 projects:

1) the dialog appears allowing me to choose the slides and objects i want to import

2) the import status dialog then appears apparently confirming that the program is proceeding to do so

3) after several minutes (up to 10) the dialog disappears, but nothing has changed in the project even though an asterisk appears in the title bar indicating that the project has changed and needs to be saved...

note: one other interesting thing is that the status dialog's bar guage very quickly fills from left to right (much quicker than i remember it progressing when it used to work)

Q: what can i do to fix this?

is there a specific library file (.dll or other) that handles this process that might have gotten corrupted and needs to be deleted ocasionally? i've also had nightmares reliably exporting to flash 8 so i've tried removing the RDMFISTUB8.DLL, but it doesn't have any affect on this issue...

while all of the new bells and whistles that captivate 2 added were very welcome, finding out after having spent the time to build projects using them only to learn that i can neither a) export to flash as a fla and know that the events will be the same as in the captivate project, b) use the import slides from other captivate project to comp various captures into a single project for publishing, or c) simply publish individual captures (in individual captivate projects) as swfs that can be worked with in flash (thanks to burying the slide contents within another movie clip and placing the expiration warning and other poop on top layers which is tedious and time conuming to remove from every frame) — i have tried importing both single slides as well as whole projects (the default setting in the import dialog) and nothing works...

thoughts? suggestions?

[Guest]

Hello whoseywhatsey,

Have you tried opening two instances of Captivate - one showing your current project and one that contains the slides that you want to copy? I would be very interested to learn what happens if you copy the slides from open Captivate project and paste them into the project you are currently working on.

From what I understand I believe that the import engine is part of the Captivate's code base so I very much doubt you will be able to influence this in any way.

If you continue to experience problems exporting to Flash 8 then I would suggest that you submit a bug report

Thus far I haven't experienced any problems exporting to Flash 8 from Captivate 2.

Regards,
Mark

[DilbertG]

Hi whoseywhatsey,

What are the contents of the project you are trying to import? Check if the first slide you are trying to import has a object, which gives problem during import?
You can say just import slide and not objects, that may give you some clues.

Also try importing in some other project, may be a blank project and see if that works.

thanks

[whoseywhatsey]

thanks for the prompt replies...

macrofireball, when you export captivate 2 projects to flash 8 are your mouse paths retained? my experience has been that the curves are lost, becoming straight lines...

other issues i've encountered include zooms not showing up at all, highlights using the color outside areas (similar to masking) not being removed in subsequent slides so that multiple older highlight windows all show up together, and layer relationships being altered so that the resulting screencast is wrong, backgrounds not showing up, small non-fullscreen placed images being rendered as though they're fullscreen (peripheral areas of the graphics rendered as opaque white space that hides the background below), etc, etc...

have you not seen this behavior at all? the time it takes to fix these chronic issues has made the program near unusable for me...

DilbertG, i've tried all manner (and number) of slide and object combinations and while it used to work, even blank slides refuse to work now...

i'll try your dual instance suggestion, but captivate is so slow when running a single instance, i'm a bit hesitant to rely on such a workaround... anyway, i'll give it a try...

[DilbertG]

Hi whosaywhatsay,

Yes, the mouse curves are lost when exported to Flash.

Zoom will come, only if while doing import/export you select "Slides as movie clip" option.

With Slides as movie clip, highlight issue should also not come.

Can you share your project with us?

thanks

[Guest]

Hello whoseywhatsey,

quote:

---

Yes, the mouse curves are lost when exported to Flash.

---

As DilbertG stated the mouse path is lost for both when you export to Flash which is a pain. If this is something you feel should be included in the next version of Captivate then I would suggest you submit this via the Captivate Feature Request and Bug Report Form

Delighted to hear that copy and pasting the slides from one project file to another is working for you. Have you tried importing them one by one, sometimes this can help if there is a corruption in your project file.

The other thing you could try would be to copy all the slides you want to add to your current project and then paste these into a new Captivate project file. If they import Ok into the file you are currently working on from this new file, then I would suspect that there might be a corruption in the original file.

Regards,
Mark

[whoseywhatsey]

DilbertG,

your copy/paste workaround from one instance to another did work, but i'd still like to figure out how to fix the import action...

thanks for the suggestion...

[whoseywhatsey]

DilbertG,

i always use export/import "Slides as movie clip" and the resulting fla do reflect this...

are there plans to retain the curved mouse paths? imo, this is (along with the automatic cursor easing) one of the realy nice features of captivate...

-t

[whoseywhatsey]

thanks for the info...

any suggestions as to how to avoid corrupting the projects in the first place? and what are the probable causes of corruption anyway?

[Guest]

Hi whoseywhatsey,

I wish I knew, I must say that in most cases Adobe Captivate 2 projects become corrupted a lot less frequently than projects authored in Captivate 1. Pesonally, I think that the best practice is to backup your files on a very regular basis. That way if you d find that a project has become corrupted you won't have to start over. If you do suspect that a certain silde has been damaged then I would always suggest copying all of the slides before suspect slide into a new blank Captivate project file and then doing the same for the slides after the said slide. If all these copy over then once you have saved the project file you can then try and copy the possible damaged slide into your new file.

This is purely guess work on my side but I think that Captivate like many other programs writes a ton of info in the file header, create a new project file and thus starting off with a new file header, sometimes is all you need to solve the problem. Well that has been my experience any way

Regards,
Mark

[whoseywhatsey]

fellows, i made a discovery that might be worth passing along...

even though i was (for obvious reasons) exporting the captivate movies to flash on windows, i was opening and working on the fla's on my mac — i've never spent a whole lot of time using flash on windows, but apparently that is one of the major contributors to the numerous issues i've been experiencing with the captivate exports...

most ofthe issues are at mmost intermittent when remaining on windows — from what i've found, flash on intel macs runs on rosetta which is slower — sad to say — than on windows via parallels... flash on the mac is a dog...

again, thanks for your help...