I had some terrible luck when it came to making my lesson in Adobe Presenter. Everything was going fine initially. The actual slide construction was exactly the same as ppt and after just a little work I was able to embed the videos I wanted. I came to the point where I was ready to do the audio tracks for my presentation when I realized that I had done all the previous steps on my desktop computer, which unlike most laptops, does not have a microphone built in. I borrowed a friends laptop and assumed it would be easier to make the recordings with his computer and transfer them over to mine, rather than install adobe presenter and transfer all the slides and videos to the laptop. I was probably wrong.
I made the recordings and transferred them to the desktop, but I couldn't find the files when I tried to import them into the presentation. After some poking I realized it was because the audio files were saved as .wma. Adobe presenter can only use .mp3 or .wav. The recordings took a fairly long time so I really didn't want to have to do them all again. I found an online converter to change them to .mp3. Still no luck. So I found an even more suspicious converter to change them to .wav files. Finally I was able to add the files to the presenter and everything seemed to be working correctly.
But... When I tried to publish the presentation and create a SWF file the progress bar reached nearly half way before "Adobe Presenter cannot publish this presentation. Unknown error." Awesome. I figured it might be an compatibility issue with one of the image or video file types. In an attempt to find the culprit I tried publish after deleting all videos clips. Same error. I then deleted all the images. Same error. I then deleted everything but the slide backgrounds.... same error. I checked Adobe's website to make sure I was clicking the right things. I was. At this point I knew it was probably the adobe presenter. I re-installed the presenter, imported all the old slides, audio, and video, then tried to publish. Same error.
After smashing my face against the keyboard, I accepted defeat and moved on to trying to make a video of the presentation instead. I found a simple to use cloud based video editor partnered with Youtube called "WeVideo." It took around 45 minutes to match all the audio files to the slides, but I was eventually able to preview my presentation. It was ready to put on Youtube so I hit publish: "Error: Publishing time remaining for this month 15:00. Video length 17:39"
(╯°_°）╯︵ ┻━┻ <== me flipping over my computer desk
I didn't want to have to stitch together the audio files again, and I couldn't think of any easy way of cutting 2 minutes of material to get below the limit. Even if I broke it into two separate videos I would still have the overall 15 minutes per month cap if I used "WeVideo" for both parts.
I deleted a video clip within the middle of the presentation trimming the length to 13 minutes and saved the video. Next I downloaded Windows Live Movie Maker so I would be free to upload more than 15 minutes of video in two parts. I took my 13 minute chunk, spliced in the video clip restoring it to it's original length, then re-cut the full length presentation into two parts. I was then finally able to upload them to YouTube. Then I had a beer.
If you're interested here are the fruits of my labor
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA6v8eur3_o
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfabXsFD2lY
If you read all of that I hope you understand why I felt the need to vent with this post haha. I think as a teach I will probably forgo Adobe presenter, too much hassle. Instead I'll add what I plan on saying with each slide in the "notes" section so students can use that as a means of reviewing the lesson outside of class, or possibly record the audio of my lecture during each class. Anyway, if anyone can tell me what I may have been doing wrong with adobe presenter, please let me know.
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ReplyDeletemust say, I applaud your perseverance! I thought I had problems until I read your post. My problem was with at the point of publishing. Maybe if we were able to publish to a server and not to our computers, the issue would disappear. I agree with you and will also forego using Adobe Presenter--too many issues at this point for it to be efficiently used (by me). However, I do like the audio recorder much better in Adobe Presenter than in PowerPoint
ReplyDeleteYeah I think Adobe presenter would be a better tool if it was built outside of Power point. I think trying to integrate the two made for a very buggy software.
ReplyDelete