I've been having a bit of a misadventure with some "whiteboard animation" software known as "Doodly." This craptastic piece of junk was, it seems, specifically created to remind me that anything that advertises "Easy! Fun! No technical skill needed!" is going to be neither easy, fun, nor useful.
My first run-in with their "support" team involved the out-of-the-box software's refusal to continue playing the audio track of the project being created beyond the end of the last animation added. This is positively crazy-making when you are trying to sync animation with pre-recorded sound. How does one know how long to make the "scene" if one CANNOT HEAR THE SOUNDTRACK? The workaround is quite cumbersome, involving adding some arbitrary amount of additional time to the end of the scene, playing the soundtrack, then pretty much guessing at how much of that extra time to remove to make a decently precise edit. For someone used to "accurate to the frame" video editing, this has serious effects on my blood pressure, but, okay, it's a fairly short project. Maybe there's a fix?
I asked tech support if there was a way to cause the soundtrack to play. I was assured there was not, and got hints that such a bit of technical wizardry was beyond the ken of both the platform and the skills of the greatest programmers in the world. There were also some implications that perhaps my skills were "too advanced" for the software, which I took to mean, "Idiot woman, you are doing it wrong." Considering I've been editing video since it involved physically cutting two-inch wide video tape, I think there's a chance I know what I'm doing in this realm. (You'd detect the sync pulses on the tape with iron filings. What a mess!)
I was invited to post a request for the feature on their "Here's where our users with time on their hands and zero knowledge post stuff for free that will be completely ignored by any developer with half a brain" forum. I declined, and informed them that if they wanted help with features, I was available on a consulting basis and to have someone with spending authority contact me.
After much back and forth and requests to "close the ticket" (which .... just to annoy them, hell no) and more hints that my expectations were wildly unrealistic, it turns out there's a freaking setting in the program called "stop playback when both animation and sound end." I informed them of this. They now wanted to close the ticket. I told them no, the only person closing this ticket would be me, since I solved the damn problem. (I have sensed that "close the ticket" is the sole function of Doodly support. Too bad.)
Next, a drag and drop feature went wonky -- the mouse would not release the thing that was dragged. I sent support a video of it doing it.
Their somewhat language-mangled response, and I quote: "In any case that this doesn't happen on your end, please try to close Doodly, restart your computer then try again.
Please let us know if you continue having trouble. "
*blinks*
"restart your computer"
"WHERE THE HELL AM I? 1983? SHOULD I BE ROBBING A 7-11 AND BUYING ALL THE MICROSOFT AND APPLE STOCK I CAN GET?"
Annoyingly enough, rebooting DOES solve the problem.
I gotta hurry and finish this project so I can get my money back for this junk.
And yes, I have noticed that the name of the program is a dead giveaway.