Crashing constantly when trying to Preview or Publish - now missing audio and video
Jun 07, 2023
Project: A 50 slide PPT course, which includes a Quizmaker quiz and audio narration. It also includes 48 required ASL videos to accommodate our employees who are Deaf/HOH. As you can imagine, this makes quite a large file size, even after downsizing all videos (i.e., the largest file went from 178 MB down to 12 MB). The Presenter file was just over 2 GB.
Problems: When I tried to Preview the file, it locked up in the phase "removing temporary files so I had to use Task Manager to end the process. When I tried again to Preview only a handful of slides, it gave me the Articulate Presenter Error Report window. After closing everything down and restarting the computer I was still unable to Publish or Preview. Then I tried to view my audio in the Editor, and everything was gone. When I tried to edit a video, it would not open the editor and showed the Presenter error window.
After stripping all the videos out, renaming the file, and redoing all videos (insert, resize & crop, and set audio to zero sound) and re-recording the audio, I still crashed when trying to publish, wasting 2 days of work.
Why is this happening, and what can I do?
5 Replies
Hello Karen,
Sorry to hear that you ran into this issue.
The. first thing you'll need to check is if your Presenter 360 course still has its associated .ppta file. The PPTA file is a special container created by Presenter 360 to store resources for your course, including audio clips, videos, web objects, quizzes, interactions, and more. You can read more about the importance of this file here:
You'll also want to make sure that you're working locally when making changes to your presentation.
If your course still has its PPTA file, would you be willing to share a copy of your project file here or in private by opening a support case so we can take a closer look at what's happening?
Here's how to create an Articulate Package. We'll delete it when we're done testing!
All PPTs had their respective PPTA files, and yes, I'm working on my C drive.
The problem seems to be resolved after I created a new PPT file and copied all the slide into it. Just slide content, no videos. I compared with 're-use', and it did not work. I just kept trying to republish while adding and checking elements. Either there was a problem with graphics, or with Smart Art. After I converted all smart art and icons to shapes, I was able to successfully republish the 'copy' test file, but not the 're-use'.
I re-recorded all the audio and exported them as a safety back-up. BTW, I tried to export a single audio file, per the instructions, but there is no 'File' tab visible when you have the 'Narration' dialog open - only a 'Record' tab. Also, when I exported all files as MP3 into a new folder, only 8 of 47 files processed and the progress window just disappeared. I tried again exporting as WAV into the same folder as the PPT file, and all the files successfully processed.
Republishing after redoing audio has been successful. Now I'm adding back the ASL videos, republishing after every 10 files to identify if there's anything else that is causing a problem. If I have any further crashes I'll update and have you look at the file.
As I've had trouble in the past, can you confirm if there is any file size threshold that will cause Presenter publishing problems?
Hi Karen,
Thanks for the detailed report on your process! I understand you'd like to know if there is a file size threshold before problems arise while publishing in Presenter 360. There is no documented limit to file size when using Presenter 360. Here is our troubleshooting article on when publishing freezes or hangs in Presenter 360.
If the crashing issue comes up again, please let us know. We'd be happy to troubleshoot for you!
The crashing problem has continued on another project. Three times I've tried the same process of creating a new project and binging the slides in with all clip art, icons and smart art converted to shapes and pictures, then re-importing audio. Still is hanging up in the publishing phase at 'removing temporary files'. Since I'm obviously not getting to the root cause of this issue, I will submit a support case.
Hello Karen,
Good call on opening a support case. I can see that my colleague Robert is working with you on identifying the root case of the issue. Let us know through the support case if you need anything else!