Help with Skipping Audio (MP4 or YouTube Export)

[douglasbeagley]

Hi,

When I publish video files from a Captivate project, such as creating an MP4 file or publishing directly to YouTube, my project frequently has skipping audio (like a skipping compact disc or vinyl record) and some gaps of silence. How bad? The problem occurs three or four times in a ten minute video, for example. The errors are inherent to the file and not to the playback. (I can rewind and hear the exact same skipping.)

I just upgraded to Captivate 7 hoping to see better video export performance. (In 5.5, I was seeing gaps of silence that would result in the audio becoming further and further out of sync with video, and the YouTube uploader tool refused login.)

Question: Are there certain settings or compression options that will reduce audio skipping when exporting to a video file? If I lower my standards a little I can avoid these problems?

Details: I am making videos that run between 5 minutes and 30 minutes, between 40 and 150 slides. I use a USB microphone to record the videos and generally end up re-editing and re-recording each slide's audio later. I generally avoid FMR as I find it too buggy, though I turn it on and off for quick exmples. Some slides in my project have no audio track, some have a few seconds, some have up to a minute of audio. I have reduced from the 128kbs setting to the 96kbs setting, with no improvement. When I publish in flash, I do not encounter any audio problems and the projects look great.

I frequently use Captivate under Parallels on a MacBook Pro (2.2 Ghz Intel Core i7). Sometimes I boot directly into Windows 7. (There is no discernable difference.) I have 10 GB of RAM and maintain at least 5GB of free hard drive space in both Mac OS and Windows 7 partitions on my drive. I avoid processor-heavy or extensive harddrive activity while compiling... usually I just leave it alone to work.

Thanks for any input or suggestions,
Douglas

[Lilybiri]

Still not clear to me: you talk about video, you publish to MP4 which is a video format. FMR is not there anymore, except for small slides in Automatic capture. For full video it is replaced by HD Video Demo? Why didn't you try that? Or did you indeed use HD Video Demo for discrete slides between static slides?

10GB of RAM may be OK (shared for graphics?) but 5GB or free space looks very small to me, but have to confess that my system is powerful (32GB of RAM, 2GB Nvidia card, lot of free space on SSD and HDD).

Lilybiri

[douglasbeagley]

Thanks for your thoughts.

I am trying to export an MP4 video, or upload a project to YouTube. When I do that, it works but the sound stutters and skips two or three times during the video.

All other details in my question are just for help analyzing the problem.

I am seeking any help in identifying what, during the compiling/export/publishing process, I can do to prevent the skipping/stuttering audio.

-D