VIEWER TIMINGS

[hjross]

I have created a training program in power point that is fairly extensive.
There are fifteen chapters and each chapter has been created as a power point
show with animation and timed narration. I use the Copy to CD function of PP
2003. Everything seems to work just fine except that the viewer ignores the
animation timings that I have saved with each slide. I know it is a viewer
problem because the slides and timings work perfectly when run with the full
program of Power Point 2003 but not with the viewer. Is there any kind of fix
or other program I can use to package this project?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Sonia]

Please see http://www.soniacoleman.com/Tutorials/PowerPoint/synchronizing.htm.
It's an issue of hardware resources, not the Viewer, if you are playing it from
the CD. You should be able to see this if you open the Viewer on your system
and then open the presentation file, also from your hard drive. In other words,
remove the CD from the test scenario.
--

Sonia Coleman
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team
Autorun Software, Templates and Tutorials
http://www.soniacoleman.com

 

[hjross]

I have already removed the CD scenario. Even when I open the viewer on my HDD
and run the PPS from the HDD, the animation and sound timings are not
synchronized. I reviewed your helpful link, however, I still need to
distribute this traing program and would like to use the PPT Viewer. Any
suggestions?

 

[Sonia]

As the link I pointed to says, PowerPoint doesn't do timing against the wall
clock or the system clock. The same is true of the Viewer. However, it is hard
to specifically address your question without more specifics. Are the timings
off by a second or less, or do they not run at all? What specific animations
seem to be the problem?

I always make the following recommendation to people who want to distribute a
presentation to other systems - - Design the presentation without reliance on
synchronization.

 

[hjross]

In answer to your question: The individual slides are quite simple temlpates
with only text and boxes with some fill coloring. The animations are fly-in
full text strings or boxes that highlight text. I don't believe that there
are any complicated animations. The animation timings were recorded at the
same time as the embedded narration for each slide. When the slides are
viewed by PPT 2003, the animations and the timings are perfect. However, when
viewed with the viewer, the timings and animations do not follow the timings
saved with each slide. They are not "off" in any consistant order, just at
random and seem to be spaced out "willy nilly".

Do you think that the problem could be the size of the recorded narations? I
recorded in mono but some of the slide narrations are 20mb (three and a half
minutes). If so, how can I convert the audio files to a lower resolution?

 

[Sonia]

PowerPoint and the Viewer have to read in the narration files and it sounds like
they are very large. You can record your narration as separate MP3 or WMA files
and then link to them and you would probably see better performance.