Difficulty automating presentation. Timings not working

G

Guest

Hi, I have Powerpoint 2000 I think.

I have a presentation set up. It has very few simple animations. Mostly
appears.

It is my year-end presentation, and will have to be entirely automated since
I will not be there.

What I have done is used the "Record Narration" feature to record all my
audio. However, some slides are cut short. I.E. 60 second long slides with 60
seconds of audio, get advanced after only 20 seconds or so. This is not how I
timed it when I went through the narration, but that's what it does anyway.

So I tried manually setting up the audio, imported from the same links it
was recorded from when I recorded. Then I used the "Rehearse Timings" feature
to time the presentation. However, when played, timings were all off. Bullets
were appearing 20 seconds late, on a slide not much longer than 20 seconds
long.

I also tried rehearsing timings after recording narrations, but what I found
was that the internal timings (bullets inside a text box, etc) and other
timings, would not be changed. It seems whatever timings I used when I last
recorded narration, were locked in and unchangable.

No combination seemed to work.

To avoid the slide-shortening, I placed a text box outside the slide on each
slide, then clicked twice to end each slide, while recording narration. That
prevented slides from ending sooner than they should have. The internal
timings are also good as long as I did it right on the first try when
recording. However, timings between slides is now off. When slides finish,
they will sit there for up to a minute.

I suspected it was doubling my timings for duration, for some reason, so I
tried editing my slide transition times (since editing them had no effect on
lengthening times earlier) to zero, in case it was adding that time onto the
recorded one, but, no effect.

I'm thinking this must be a bug in PP 2000, because it completely ignores
rehearsal timings. Bug or not, is there a way to do what I want?

Also, is there any way to edit the internal timings of a slide? I.E. Bullets
inside the same text box? The only two ways I can find are recording and
rehearsing, and, as above, neither work. I suppose I could hard-code
everything and have every comment in it's own text box, but, that would be a
last ditch resort.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.
 
S

Shyam Pillai

Matt,
I recall there was a bug in PPT 2000 narration timings. I'll try to dig up
the relevant KB article. There were a couple of workarounds mentioned in it.
 
G

Guest

Matt,
I recall there was a bug in PPT 2000 narration timings. I'll try to dig up
the relevant KB article. There were a couple of workarounds mentioned in it.

AHA. I found a couple similiar articles, but each basically involved redoing
the entire presentation, or at least all the audio again. I tried following
one or two, but, no result.

For example, if there's a 30 second pause, it said the slide must be
corrupt. Hrm. I don't think so. I've had it repeated. Or if it's a short
pause between slides, it's because of audio loading. I doubted it (since I
can force it faster, manually), but tried resampling my audio with Audacity
down to something that wouldn't've made the cut for an Atari, and, no change.

But, by all means, any workarounds you find would be much appreciated. A
shame it was never fixed in the actual program, if that's the case.
Regards,
Shyam Pillai

Matt.
 
G

Guest

Hi Matt,
I was referring to this KB article:
PPT2000: Narration Cut Off When You Use Narration and Rehearse Timings
Together
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;251035

Hrm. Nope, that doesn't fix it. That's not exactly my problem either. That
is if I recorded, for example, 60 seconds of audio, but then set my timings
to advance after 20 seconds. Obviously that would cut it off.

I tried the shape workaround thing, didn't fix it eithe.r

Anything I do with "rehearse timings" is ineffective on any of the actual
timings, if I've ever "recorded narration." It keeps the original timings,
whether I want it to or tell it to, or not.

Yet if I do not "record narratioN" at all, but import raw audio instead..
then the "rehearse timings" is slow, for everything, for some reason.

Thanks for the help though, anyone else?
Shyam Pillai

Matt.
 

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