Assets correct on timeline, incorrect on preview/publish
Dec 10, 2015
Using the trick given here, we've been updating assets in a .story file (after backing up, of course, since Steve points out that it isn't supported). While this is a tremendously helpful trick, we're running into some odd issues.
On the timeline, audio that we've altered is correct, and images that have been retouched with Adobe Photoshop are sounding and appearing exactly as expected. But when we preview the slide or publish the project, we find that the changes don't appear. We hear the original version of the audio, and see the original version of the images. (In case it's relevant, we're using Update 7 : 1509.1408.)
This doesn't happen on every slide, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to when it works and when it doesn't. Our editing does not change duration of the audio or dimensions of the images, so we can rule out that problem. We edit directly from WinZip, which automatically prompts to save the changed temporary file back in place, so that's also not a problem. We've tried the following:
• Saving/closing project, exiting/relaunching Storyline 2, and reopening project
• Previewing each slide individually
• Previewing each asset within the slide
• Rechecking the assets inside the archive (.story file)
• Saving to a new filename
From observing Storyline 2's behavior, I'm inclined to think it is somehow caching the old assets (perhaps to improve performance). If that's the case, I'm wondering if there's a file in the .story that might be deleted to force Storyline 2 to rebuild anything it has cached.
Has anyone else tried direct editing of the assets like this? If so, what has your experience been?
4 Replies
That's what I was thinking. I have constant problems with IE displaying old Storyline content. Other browsers seem to work fine. I'm not sure what C. L. is referring to about Winzip. I'm not sure why one would do that.
Hi CL,
I'd also think it's a caching issues on the browser, or if you're seeing it in the .story file perhaps you're working off a network/shared drive and then it's showing cached versions from your network? We recommend working locally for that reason.
I can rule out the browser, since assets would appear one way on the timeline and differently when that slide was previewed inside Storyline 2. And it was worked on locally—did catch that helpful suggestion elsewhere. :-)
What did work, albeit a bit arduous, was to rename the
.storyfile to.zipand then extract the contents of the/story/mediafolder to a separate folder. Once we had those assets separated out, we went back into the project and replaced each bad asset (via Change Picture or Change Audio) with one of the ones we had extracted. Worked like a charm, but was quite time-consuming.I did also note there's a
.binfile in the/story/mediadirectory that appears to be roughly the same size as all the media assets combined. I'm wondering if that is some sort of cache for all media assets. I tried both deleting the file and replacing it with an empty duplicate before renaming the project file back to.story, but neither seemed to have any effect.So definitely make backups and proceed with caution when tinkering with this method!
Thanks CL for sharing that method here. I've not heard of anyone mentioned the .bin file previously, but as we can't offer support for modifications to the published output it's hard for me to say one way or another.
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