Summary: Sync video with animations and annotations using the Sync Animation tool.
Difficulty: Easy/Medium
Video Is Engaging
I like video. It is powerful, immediate and engaging. As bandwidth becomes less of an issue, there is more opportunity to spice up courses with moving images. While synchronizing video with animations in Articulate Presenter is not officially supported we have offered some solutions in the past. In Presenter ‘09 syncing video and animations has never been easier. In fact, you can now sync video in pretty much the same way as you sync audio.
Summer Hours
I thought I’d give myself a challenge and try and sync subtitles to a soundtrack of the movie Summer Hours. Given that the subtitles change often and quickly and need to match what is being said in the video, I thought it might be a tall order. Well it wasn’t. The hardest part was writing out the text and knowing when to click!
Golden Rules
When working with video syncing always do the following:
- Encode your videos at 30 fps (not 29 fps or 29.97 fps as I saw recently). If you use the Articulate Video Encoder, you should have no problems.
- Publish your presentation at 30 fps. The Studio Update 4 now allows us to vary the publication frame rate in the Presentation Options -> Publish.
Syncing animations with video on the slide
Basic Steps
- Add On Click animations to your slide
- Import your video onto the slide.
- Go to Sync Animations.
- Play and click through the animations as you watch the video.
- If you want your video to play in the slide, you’re done. Just Preview your presentation to check that timings are ok and then Publish (at 30 fps).
Syncing animations with video in the Presenter Panel
If you want the video to play in the Presenter panel, do the same as if you were planning to have video on the slide but then:
- Remove the video from the slide (delete).
- Insert it into the Presenter panel.
- Go ahead and Preview and Publish. Your animation timings will stick.
Syncing annotations with video
This method should also work for annotations.
- Place the video on the slide, somewhere where it won’t interfere with you placing your annotations.
- Select Sync Animations.
- Select Show Annotations Tool so that you can apply annotation as you play the video.
- Click Start Sync and your video will begin to play.
- Apply the annotations as you would animations.
- Click Stop Sync and Save and Close.
- Insert the video into the Presenter panel or into the slide and Preview and Publish. Again, make slight adjustments in the Audio Editor if necessary.
You can of course apply annotations and animations at the same time to your video by alternately using the annotations tool or syncing the animations via the Sync button as I show at the end of the demo below:
Adjustments In The Audio Editor
If your video is slightly out, lagging or too early:
- Open the Audio Editor.
- Add or remove some silence at the beginning of the slide
- Move the click markers as you like.
If you synced properly using the Sync Animation tool, you shouldn’t need to make too many changes.
Notes:
- Use the Record Narration tool.
- Insert the video on the slide the same way and sync as before via the Record Narration tool.
- When you’ve finished, go into Import Audio.
- Remove the narration for that slide.
Your animations will stick and should play better on a Mac.
GREAT INFORMATION! I got this to work! I have video from our Users Conference, and was seeing how to get it to our LMS – Producer, Camtasia – this is DEFINITELY an option.
One thing I did differently. In your demo, you have one slide with the PPT. For me, the video is of the presenter presenting the PPT, so there are multiple slides. So, what I did is I saved the PPT as JPEGs, and then inserting all of the pictures on one slide, and animated them to appear with a click. I hope I made myself clear – do you have any other idea?
One question with the way I did it – there is only one slide and so the navigation panel is not useful – is there a way to add information to the navigation panel and then also “synch” it with the slide animation?
Thank you very much,
Sam Kamin
Hi
Is there a definite problem synching audio from Captivate 4 to Articulate? If so is your above
solution the answer. We use a separate Audio recorder Sound Forge for recording audio.
Look forward to your answer!
MaryLea
Captivate 4 does cause problems in Presenter and our developers are aware of the issue. Unfortunately it looks like bad programming on the part of Adobe (I would say that, wouldn’t I :)). Captivate 3 worked fine with both Presenter ‘09 and Presenter 5. I don’t use Captivate but yes, I see no reason why you couldn’t just record audio over the video that you created in Captivate. Of course, you still need to be able to control the video that was created in Captivate via the player in Articulate if you want to sync correctly.
Excellent tutorial! I’ve referred to this quite a bit as I’ve been learning the ropes with this program.
One issue that I can’t seem to find when I google around is this:
I have a short video of someone speaking in front of a white background. I was hoping to have animated text and images that appear over top of the video. Is this at all possible? In powerpoint, the Video Placeholder seems to be at a layer below my animations, yet whenever I publish, the video always comes out on top.
Thanks for your help!
Hi James, Glad you liked the tutorial ! I have been on vacation so I have taken some time to get back to you. From what you say, I am guessing your video in on the main slide and not in the Presenter panel. You’re right when you say the video always appears on top. I found a workaround to this issue by using Quizmaker ‘09 and embedding that into Presenter ‘09. Have a look at the Michael Jackson demo in this article. (annotate videos) The technique is pretty easy. Of course, if you have been syncing audio and video, you may want to do that directly in Quizmaker ‘09 and import the lot into Presenter.
Thanks a lot for this tutorial