Sparkol Help

Topic not covered?

Start a new topic

Crashed and destroyed

I purchased Videoscribe/Sparkol PRO for around about $600 several years ago. It was ok. I made some reasonably useful scribes, and I found them effective. But now and again, the system would crash and destroy the scribe - and I mean destroy totally. 


I started saving online and on my local disc so I would literally have two copies, and I always have automatic backup going every few minutes.I even got to exporting files constantly and renaming them as at least I had some way of going back to recover. But this is way too much work to do this on every file. Its not a reasonably approach.


About 2 years ago, I just decided Videoscribe was not stable enough to put serious time into it and I just stopped using it.


This week, I downloaded 3.3 and started on a project that I thought would be a good opportunity to try it again.  I spent 9 hours today creating what seemed to be a really nice presentation. BUT......when I thought it was almost finished, I decided to add a couple more slides to the end....and for some reason, the system just froze - I could not save the file - many other features worked, but save did not. Not only could I not save, but I could not get out of the scribe. I spent about 30 minutes trying differnt things ...and eventually had no choice but kill Videoscribe.


The result, was my scribe was totally destroyed. It appeard to work when I loaded it, but there was no timeline at the bottom, so nothing could be changed, and many of the elements were simply missing.


The reason I stopped using this program was instability and when it crashed it seemed to take the scribe down with it. Today I literally wasted 9 hours. It is a sickening thought to see the results of so much time wasted. It seems to me, that there are some fundamental issues in the way Sparkol save files and they need to deal with it.


I am using a macbook pro, version 3.3.

You could save the damaged project as a .scribe file and attach it here or save it online and raise a support ticket to ask customer support for help.


-Mike (videoscribe user)

I did - thanks - they found that one of the elements was corrupted and that corrupted the entire file. This has happened before. I have a suspicion that it is related to an illegal character in a text field - what that illegal character is, I dont know , but I do know that on the text field that apparently corrupted the entire file according to the Sparkol folks, did identify to me an illegal character when I copied the text from my word script. If this is the case, then Videoscribe needs to be able to come up with a mechanism that does not allow an illegal character to be entered which may have happend in my case. It was a pretty disastrous situation - I would also like access to utility programs that the Sparkol people must have had access to to rescue the script. Its happend several times before.


Login to post a comment