Anyone else always having to go to the end and shorten timeline?

Sep 20, 2012

As I make modules, I am forever finding that for strange unknown reasons, my slide timelines' overall lengths get lengthened way out like 60 seconds long or so, and I am constantly having to scroll to the right, drag it back, scroll a little more in, drag it left again, over and over again just to get it to come back to the end point of my audio track.

Anyone know what causes it to get pushed so far to the right somehow?

Anyone have a fast trick for automatically snapping it back as far left as the last chronological item in the timeline?

58 Replies
Paul Devine

Hi, has anybody managed to progress the possible cause of this issue further?  I have been working on a large project recently that suffered from a sudden timeline issue where every video sequence had the timelines lengthened to 85 seconds.  I then spent hours amending these back.  My suspicion at present is that it might be a bug, and particularly linked to .png files.  I inserted a .png file into my project at some point, and the issue possibly stemmed from that moment onwards.  Any clarification would be much appreciated.  For info, I am using Storyline 2, Update 7, 1508:1408.

Michel Gilbert

Paul - a couple of things come to mind, though I'm not sure if they apply to you. For example, if you have an object on one slide that has a fixed time length of 85 seconds and you copy that item to other slides, it will (potentially) stretch those timelines to 85 seconds. Not sure if you did this, but it can happen if you have a standard part of the page you choose to put ON the page instead of in the master.

There is also a bug in Version 7. If you have an object aligned to a cue point, and you use the "align to cue point" capability to realign the object to an EARLIER cue point, Storyline ADDs the time difference to the end of the timeline. So if you have a 20 second timeline, and you realign an object that currently begins the 10-second mark to a cue point at the 6-second mark, you are moving it BACK in time 4 seconds, so Storyline arbitrarily adds 4 seconds to the timeline (your new timeline will be 24 seconds with 4 seconds of "dead-air" at the end). This bug gets ugly if you realign multiple items. I once realigned 42 items to a point 18 seconds earlier in the timeline and Storyline added 42 x 18 = 756 seconds to the timeline. Pain in the backside! They know about it and, hopefully, it will be fixed in the next release.

Phil Mayor

I have seen a bug on layers reverting to 5 seconds if you shrink the timeline and then group some objects.

I have not seen the timeline in the base layer change on its own. It only ever happens if I paste in an object that is longer than that timeline or snap to cue points or insert a video or audio file. To help the developers it often helps to be able to show repeatable steps. Perhaps next time it happens you could retread your steps and see if you can find the cause.

Sent from my iPhone