Copying Objects without Extending Time of Slide

Nov 16, 2015

How do you copy objects from one slide or even the same slide without extending the time of the slide? It is very annoying to have to manually shorten slide time after  pasting several objects...

Thanks

jackL

6 Replies
Daniel Sposato (Philly)

This is something I've noticed too. It's annoying. But what I usually do if I have objects I know I'm going to copy and paste is I'll add them to a slide and set them all to 1 second. This works to avoid them increasing the slides length when I paste them. Once I'm done using copying and pasting from the slide them I'll later delete it. I know I'll still have to deal with it if I create a grouping of objects or something on a slide that I want to copy from, but this helps me save some time resizing timelines most of the time.

Also if you only want it to be on there for say 1 second after you paste it, then you have to make it not be attached to the end of the slide by either dragging the end of it away from the end of the timeline or right clicking on the object's layer in the timeline and unchecking "Show Until End".

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Jack and Daniel,

This was an issue when you were aligning objects to a cue point, and was fixed in the Update 5 of Storyline 2. It is still an issue with align to playhead that our team is investigating. I've also heard users who had that difficulty if the object was previously hidden and extends the timeline upon being unhidden. So it's worth keeping those pieces in mind too - and if you're seeing it occur differently, can you share some of the steps you go through to see the odd behavior? 

Daniel Sposato (Philly)

For me, the way I have noticed it is that if I bring in an image to the stage it gives it a default of 3 seconds or something like that on the timeline. If you then add audio you extend the object's length of time to fit the full length (let's say 10 seconds). Then if I copy that image from that slide and paste it to the next it now pastes in with a timeline presence of 10 seconds.

I think the ideal copy and paste would be for it to default to a short amount of seconds after the playhead on the timeline. Maybe their could be a variable built into the SL settings that we could set to determine the length of time a pasted object would show for! I'd love that! In fact I'll add that as a feature request right now!

I think the existing ability to copy and paste an entire slide as it is with timeline layout included is the only time that the existing time on objects should be included.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Daniel,

That actually sounds like it's working as expected. The default timeline of Storyline is typically set to 5 seconds. Once you add audio, the slides timeline is extended and any items you've had on your slide which are set to "show until end" or "show always" they'll also extend with the audio, so if you're copying those items after they've already extended that timeline length will carry over. You can also change it once on the slide as described here. 

Daniel Sposato (Philly)
Ashley Terwilliger

That actually sounds like it's working as expected.

I agree, but find it undesired because when I copy from a slide and paste to another slide I'd like it to not bring over the time data and just have the paste use a customizable default time to paste it in from the position of the playhead. It would save time because often times when you copy an item that was on an extremely long timeline it readjusts it and you don't want it to because you've already spent time adjusting the length to a desired position. I know that when I first started using SL2 and I would paste an object from another slide I wasn't expecting it to also adjust the time as I would imagine most people wouldn't.

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