Getting slides from screencast to stay paused" with object trigger

Jul 01, 2013

I have an existing project another employee generated in Storyline that includes a short screencast (which created a group of slides) where she added captions to ask the user to click on an object (rectangle) to emphasize where to click to move to another function (the next slide).  This works great with an object trigger in her story for that slide and the caption and object stay "paused" until the user clicks on the object which then moves to the next slide.

Two questions:

1. I have replicated the screencast and made an object trigger to have the user click on the object, which moves to the next slide, and all is staying on "pause" until I click on the object in the Preview Scene option. Before I had a slide trigger and it said to advance to next slide when the slide ended.  I removed it. Do triggers work in a hierarchy and should you only have object triggers for this type scenario?

2.  How do I get the caption (which tells the user to click on the link (object) and the object to stay visible UNTIL THE USER DOES CLICK ON THE OBJECT????

4 Replies
Donna Copeland

I want to share what I was able to figure out on my own after all!  It turns out that the reason the caption and object vanished was that despite the slide have NO animation and NO transition, other than via the use of the generated object trigger, the two items on the timeline were set to Fade Out (all at once).  So although the slide continued to stay "paused", the caption and object faded out "all at once".   Very interesting for a truly newbie user to discover!!!

Anyone else experience this kind of interaction?  Still interested in if I am right in my trigger hierarchy concept, if anyone can confirm or not.

Christine Hendrickson

HI there Donna. Welcome to the community!

Nice job! :) Yes, those captions (created in a recording) will have those types of effects by default. You can either remove them, or you can adjust the timeline so that they stay on the slide/visible longer. 

Positioning of triggers can be pretty important. You'll want to arrange them so that the top-level trigger is the one you want to fire first. So, say you want to change the state of an object and then close a layer. First you would need to change the state, then close the layer - if you close the layer first, that state change may not take place and so on.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Donna Copeland

Thank you Christine for confirming my solution, and especially for emphasizing the placement (sequence) of the object triggers in order to provide the right sequence of events.  One last question; my last slide in the screencast has the same caption and object (rectangle) for the user to click on, with the same properties (no animation) to stay visible until the user clicks on the object.  I suspect I need to do some more "fine tuning" with the screencast frames as to when it ends.  Right now the last frame of the screencast has been changed (moved farther out) by my project lead (who used to use Captivate) so that we could end on what would really be the next screen after the user clicks on the object.

I am thinking in this case I also may need to take the caption and object and make them both animate to fade out quickly so that they are not STILL APPEARING (the opposite problem of what I figured out for the preceding slides) when the last frame of the screencast moves to the next logical screen.

I do not think Storyline will allow me to take copy the last frame of the current screencast and paste it into a new last slide.  I suspect I will need to make a new recording of just that one screen on a new last slide.  What would you recommend to a newbie as being the most efficient way, insert a screen as an image, record just that one screen (since we do not need audio, captions, anything on this screen)  before I start the quiz scene?

Christine Hendrickson

Hi there Donna,

Quick question and possibly a solution - have you tried right-clicking on the slide that contains the final frame and used the "Duplicate" option? Hopefully, that will make an exact copy of the frame for you, and you can modify it so that it suits your needs.

I know that's a short response, but if that does work for you, hopefully that will save you a lot of time and effort! :)

Let me know if you have any trouble with this.

Thanks!

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