Animated GIF playback

Aug 01, 2013

L D
By L D

Hello Community,

My thanks in advance for addressing this question/concern.

I happen to create a lot of slick, smooth animated GIFs and and very disappointed in Storyline's playback of them. Not only does Storyline not recognize the playback order (loop, loop once, only play once, etc) but it doesn't respect the fps (frames per second) that the GIF is set to. I'm told that Storyline operates at 30fps, but if I put in a 30fps animated GIF and publish, I can count out 2 whole seconds before a 1 second GIF runs its course. The result is a choppy playback that doesn't adhere to the original file settings.

Some other notes:

  • I've tried 15fps, 30fps, and 60fps. It's the same with each.
  • I've tried playing the GIF on it's own in different browsers and they play smoothly and correctly in each.
  • I've tried viewing the GIF in preview mode and published as HTML and HTML5, both with no success.

I really hope I just missing something that someone will point out to me, because if I'm not this is real shame.

Thanks!

35 Replies
Paul Mullins
over 7 years ago11/16/16 at 12:52 pm (UTC)

I've just come across this thread looking to resolve an animated gif not playing (at all) in Storylie 2 (up to date yesterday) and thought I would share something I've discovered that might be useful to others. I was particularly confused that the gif would not run as there is another animated gif running happily and the 2 files were both created in the same way (Photoshop CC). What I've found is that Storyline must have a file size limit for playback of animated gifs. Having reduced the file size of the file it played happily just like the first (It went from 2 mb down to 80k). Part of that process was reducing the pixel size of the file, so I'm not sure which made the difference, but this resolved my issues.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 7 years ago11/16/16 at 6:36 pm (UTC)

Hi Stian,

I haven't seen anything that indicated a certain FPS for an animated gif, although I do know that we'll publish Flash/SWF files at 30 fps. Are you having difficulty with it while in preview, publish, both? Do you have a sample gif file you could share with us? Also, as Paul mentioned have you confirmed you're on the latest update of Storyline 2 Update 11? 

Stian Larsen
over 7 years ago11/18/16 at 8:25 am (UTC)

Demo gif

That's weird. If I can make my gifs play back at 24-30 FPS then it would solve quite a lot of the shortcomings regarding animation.

Ashley, I posted a gif in this reply, and attached the same gif. Try placing that in Storyline. On my end, storyline plays it back very slow and not smooth at all. Might be a problem at my end if it works fine for you?

Leslie McKerchie
over 7 years ago11/18/16 at 4:10 pm (UTC)

Hi Stian!

Thanks for sharing the file and allowing us to take a look. I played online with an editor and sped it up, verified frame rates, etc and it always plays the same speed in Storyline.

We do have an open issue with our QA Team directly related to the Animated GIF frame rate not being respected in SL2.

I will add this thread as well for awareness of users impacted as well as to provide an update when applicable.

Stian Larsen
over 7 years ago11/22/16 at 8:57 am (UTC)

Thanks for checking it out for me, and confirming the issue is not only on my installation :)
Looking forward to an update, addressing these issues.


As a side-question; will you continue to support and develop AS2 (and maybe release AS3), or will new features only be available in Articulate 360? Sorry for off-topic :D

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