No good use model to resuse audio, pptx animations and annotations

If you do a save as in PPT this will cretae a new PPTA and you can reuse slides and animations etc are maintained

I don't see the value to exporting a silent MP3

>>If you do a save as in PPT this will cretae a new PPTA and you can reuseslides and animations etc are maintained

I'm not sure that I understand your answer. If I misunderstoodyour answer could you please give more detail.....

I know that a new ppta can be created but his won'tsave me anything. 

It is the sync of animations with the audio and also theannotations, both of which I make with Articulate, that I want to reuse.

If I export audio in the old presentation and then import audioagain, I lose that information. Then I need to listen to the complete slideaudio I imported again , in order to sync animations with audio again, exactlythe same as I would have done in the old presentation and add back exactly thesame annotations. I'm repeating work I have already done for no gain.

Here is another use case example. It could be that I want tomerge 2 presentations both of which have their own ppta file, along with 10 new slides . Idon't want to have to sync animations to audio again or add in annotationsagain for the 2 existing presentations. What would you suggest would be thebest way of reusing the information from the 2 ppta files that may have taken along time to create.

>>I don't see the value to exporting a silent MP3

Wellthe value is it makes it easier for customers to reuse the work that theyalready did. For example I want to import  previously exported audio fromoriginal slides 8-48 to new slides 57-97 of an updated presentation. However,there is no audio for original slides  15, 18, 22, 25, 27, 32, 47. Howeasy is it going to be for me to know which MP3's to select on the import fileslist and then know which new slides to associate them with?  Please explain what you would do in that casewhich would be easier than pointing at new slide 57 and saying “import the nextcontiguous 41 MP3's”, some of those being “empty” MP3s which Articulate createdfor slides with no audio. What is the cost ?- 10kb per slide without audio.

Thisnotwithstanding of course that when I eventually work out which 41-7=34 MP3's toimport, the order in which they get imported, due to the way they get named bythe "export audio" feature in Articulate audio editor, will be Slide10, Slide 11, Slide12, Slide13, Slide14, Slide 16, etc.... - Slide 8 and Slide9will be the last 2 slides to get imported. That is not good.

Imade suggestions in the previous post about how your customers could have aneasier path to reuse of the effort that they put into creating the ppta file.

WhatI would like is for the tool to already do this and someone just to tell mehow.

Ifthe facility already exists then it is not intuitive in my opinion, otherwise  perhaps the suggestions I made could be takenon board.

        Thanks, Michael Avery.

If you open PPT and save the presentation as another name, the new powerpoint will have animations and animations preserved because a new pita will be created.  these can then be repurposed.

I still cannot see the value of a silent MP3, I think the feature request here is for the audio to be exported to logical names e.g

I have audio on slide 1, 3 and 5, then it exports to Slide01.pm3, Slide03.mp3 and Slide05.mp3.  I can see that silent MP3s will cause issues where some users would expect there to be sound when there isn't also when sharing files this may cause more work when checking to see if there was meant to be audio or not.

here is the link to submit a feature request

http://www.articulate.com/support/contact/submit.php?form=feature

Firstly, thanks very much for the link and taking the time to reply . I'll submit some feature requests.

Regarding your reply, what would make it easy for me to understand would be if you could answer the questions posed in the scenarios described in my previous post above (which gives the context of those questions I repeat here), namely:-

1) What would you suggest would be the best way of reusing the information from the 2 ppta files that may have taken along time to create?

2) What you would do in that case which would be easier than pointing at new slide 57 and saying “import the next contiguous 41 MP3's?

Thanks, Michael

To combine two ppts I believe you will beef to reimport the audio and regime the slides. The Ppta file is just a container.

Studio has no batch import feature like that and exporting, I think if this was developed a more intuitive solution than exporting blank audio is key. 

I would urge urge you to submit your feature requests, you may find that if you want reusable content ANC the ability to import slides then Storyline is much more flexible. 

To anyone interested in following this, I will raise some feature requests but  someone may find this information useful:

When I have a new pptx file in a new directory and have recorded something with Articulate , a new ppta file gets created in the local directory. Embedded in the metadata of the *pptx* file is the path of the associated ppta file. You can see this in PowerPoint by looking at the advanced properties of the pptx file.

If I copy the pptx to another directory (without copying the ppta), then start to record audio, annotations or sync Powerpoint animations to audio, then the ppta gets copied from where ever the path in the metadata of the pptx points to, giving me the effect of those things from the old ppta having been preserved somehow. 

This may be OK for small companies or individuals, but in large corporations which keep the pptx and ppta under source control and may have many people working on the same presentation, then the meta data is most likely pointing to a path which does not exist on the machine on which the pptx is being updated.

When eventually the pptx is updated, then I want to reuse the audio, sync to Powerpoint animations, and annotations - all work I did in Articulate and saved to a previous ppta.

If the new pptx just has even a single slide added somewhere in the middle of the presentation then in one test I did, audio gets applied to the slides correctly, i.e. it is recognised that there is a new slide and the original audio is applied to the next original slide after the new slide which was inserted. There is no audio for the new slide as expected. However some animation syncs and annotations get messed up.

In a more realistic case, I applied a ppta with recording from an original presentation with 98 slides to a new presentation  where 10 slides were added in two seperate places. What happened then is that audio gets imported but the import starts at the first new slide, slide 36, and the original audio does not get associated with the correct slide. Slides 1-35, which did not change when the pptx was updated, have no audio now.

This is really the crux of the issue for me. I would expect Articulate to be smart enough to apply existing audio, sync to animations and annotations to the same slides (as per their title)  if they still exist. Sure it is obvious that I need to sort out manually anything that is new or has a slide title changed, for example. But when adding 10% new slides I don't want to have to resync animations to audio and rerecord annotations for 100% of the slides. 

An answer would be to always update the pptx with the ppta in the same directory, but this is not practical for several reasons.

1) The ppta file is approx 180x the pptx file size. That is too costly for network transfer, backed up storage for source control, time it takes to do anything.

2) There is no mechanism (which people could not bypass accidentally or otherwise) to ensure that the pptx and ppta remian in sync.

3) Not everyone who may update the presentation has or would know how to use Articulate

4) What happens when I want to make a new presntation using audio, annotations and sync of animations to audio from, for example, 3 other pptx presentations each of which have thier own ppta files?

As I siad i will raise some feature request to address this.

It sounds like Presenter is not the correct tool for you.  Presenter works best with a single person developing the files, it doesn't work well with more than one person working on a file, as the file structure can become disassociated as you have found, and does not work well over network for editing.

It may be better to look at the tool you are using, rather than trying to make the one you have fit your needs, as I said previously Storyline will allow for seamless importing of slides and easy reusing of content.