New to Storyline: Playhead issue

Thank you. Hmm... let me ask this another way: Is the timeline display supposed to go back to the beginning every time you hit Pause?

All I'm trying to do is to pause the timeline and insert a caption.

Hi Thomas!

This is not the behavior I'm seeing. I think I misunderstood what you are reporting. I am able to pause the timeline and insert a caption if I want, when I hit play the timeline begins where I left it.

If you are using 'Stop', this would take it back to the beginning:

You can preview a slide using the player controls in the lower left corner of the timeline.

• Click the Play/Pause button once to start the playhead (blue vertical line) moving along the timeline.
• Click the Play/Pause button again to pause the playhead at its current location.
• Click the Stop button to end the preview and return the playhead to beginning of the timeline.

You can read more in this tutorial.

Thanks again. Yes, exactly... my timeline "view" goes back to the beginning when I hit Pause. So I guess something is wrong with my software setup.

Interesting. I would advise a repair for starters then.

Thanks again. Tried a repair, reviewed system requirements, and did a re-install. Unfortunately did not fix. I also tried to import into a new project.

I also realized that my .story file is 97 MB. It doesn't make sense, because I only have four scenes of video and they're not that long (on average about two minutes each).

I have a 2.5 GHz processor and 16 GB of ram.

Any other ideas? If not, could you direct me to Support? Again, I'm unable to add captions because each time I hit Pause the display goes back to the beginning.

Regards,

Tom

I think the playhead stays where it is when you hit pause. When you say your display returns to the beginning, I think you are seeing the slide view. Storyline's slide view does not show what things look like at a specific point in time. Everything on the slide is visible all the time. The playhead you are referencing only marks where the preview will start if you preview from the timeline. Referencing Leslie's image, if you set the playhead and then add an object, the object will be added to appear at the playhead, without respect to what you see in slide view.

You can move it on the timeline to make it appear and/or disappear at will.

Thanks again. Generally speaking, when you click Stop the video goes back to the beginning. When you click Pause, it pauses at that point in the video. Is that correct?

So, that's at least what the behavior was when I first started adding captions. The more I added, however, the latency grew worse. Once I got to about 10 captions (in a 3 minute video) the Pause button just started to act like the Stop button.

I think we may be talking about two different things?

Anyway, sorry for the confusion... may be time to move on to a different tool.

This is the same issue I am having and it is frustrating!

Hi Kim! Did you look into the solutions shared above? You are welcome to reach out to our support team here if needed.

Thomas, I apologize, I just realized that you requested access to support. I see you reached out to our team (00698779) already, so you should be hearing from someone soon.

I have exactly this issue as well. Using cue points is a good start but doesn't solve the problem when you need to POSITION an object on the screen relative to something in the video. For example, I'm trying to insert a zoom region so that I can focus on a particular dialog box that appears halfway through the video. I need to be able to stop the video and have the video stay on the current frame so that I can resize and position my zoom region correctly. 

Often if I preview the slide from timeline, hitting pause will do just that - you are at a certain point in the video and can put shapes, whatever on the screen and you are seeing the status of the slide at x seconds. This has always been very buggy though. sometimes it works, sometimes you have to wait an eternity for Storyline to catch up, sometimes it just doesn't work at all. Even when it does work, it is sloooooooow, so adding objects to make interactive videos is a pain in the you-know-what.

So maybe asking the question differently: how do you advise positioning objects over the top of the video, for example to position a zoom region or maybe an arrow that is pointing to something that is only visible at 5 seconds in?

Hi Christina,

Thanks for reaching out and sharing the feature that would be helpful for you in your project. The ability to scrub the timeline while you're developing is one that we're tracking and I've added this conversation to the report.

In the meantime, it sounds like you are already aware of cue points, which is what I would advise and hopefully others in the community will be able to chime in and share their best practices as well.

Hi Leslie,

I'm pretty baffled, to be honest. Perhaps we're talking at cross purposes.

Cue points only help you with TIMING of objects. I'm interested in how you suggest objects are POSITIONED on the slide.

Only this week there was a link to interactive video ideas including shapes on the video in the eLearning Heroes weekly email. So it can be done and indeed, I've done it on countless projects over the last two years. I put a software screencast on a slide, I move the playhead to the desired point on the timeline, I wait and the slide updates to show the frame of video relative to that point in the timeline, I add my shape/zoom region. But this feature often stops working inexplicably.

The feature is already there, it just doesn't work well.

Bamboozled,

Christina

Hi Christina,

I think you're referring to this example Nicole shared earlier this week, so I recorded a quick Peek of how she did that. As for the placement of her objects, she likely placed on the baselayer to preview it and then moved them to the layers using cut/paste. 

Hope that helps clarify. 

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Ashley.

So taking the Peek example you made, imagine that at the point where you stopped the playhead and created the cue point, you wanted an arrow to float in and point at the machine in the background on the right. You want to tell learners what that is, for example. This machine moves as the camera pans across the shot. How do you make sure your arrow is pointing to the right place on the screen at the point in the video where you created the cue point, given that pressing pause causes the video to reset?

I understand, Christina.

What you are asking is precisely what others have requested and is contained in the feature request I mentioned previously.

One additional idea would be to utilize the slide ruler, gridlines, and/or guides while working on your slide to know where to line up items as needed:

Thanks Leslie, that's the confirmation I was looking for.

So the scrubbing "feature" already working is a happy accident. I'll look forward to the feature being formalised ASAP cos it adds a truckload of development time and I work with screen simulations. A Lot.

Hi Christina. 

I completely agree with you!
There seems to be no effort in actually solving the timeline position issue that has been open for years now. 
The ability to stop at any point and actually seeing what goes on at that exact frame is crucial for any e-learning building software, no matter what type of elements that is on the timeline.
As you, I'm also baffled with the "solutions" that staff come up with. 
Please, dear developers: Make the timeline work as it should do. This is what I would call basic functionality and should have been working from the very first version of this software.

I found a workaround this morning that may be helpful to some.

I wanted to float in an arrow on a screencast to highlight a mouse cursor change when certain actions are taken in a software. I had a screencast of the actions taken and the cursor changes just for a second about halfway through. Blink and you'll miss it, hence the desire for an arrow to point it out.

I used the timeline to play the video and first added a cue point when the cursor appeared. I then played the video again from just before that cue point and at the moment where the cursor changed in the video, I took a screenshot of the whole slide (making sure I was viewing at 100%).

I inserted the screenshot onto the slide, which mean it was acting a bit like a freeze frame, and placed my "here it is!" arrow so that it was pointing to the right place on the screen. You could just put the arrow on the right place in the timeline or place it on a layer that's triggered when the timeline reaches the cuepoint, whatever works. Then I deleted the screenshot leaving the video with an arrow floating it at the correct moment, in the correct place.

It's not elegant - I had to have a few goes at capturing the split second where the cursor changed so a more frame exact approach would have been helpful - but it worked for what I needed to do today.

Hi everyone - I know this thread is from five years ago, but curious if anyone else is having this issue still? I noticed today whenever I pause the playhead / cursor in the timeline, no matter where I am, and then press play, the playhead / cursor goes all the way back the beginning. So I am having a hard time pausing, timing my visuals with my audio, because I am constantly being forced to start at the beginning of the audio. I am curious if this is an issue with the latest update? 

I understand cuepoints could be helpful and could be a bandaid fix right now but this isn't how Storyline typically behaves (and has taken extra time to complete simple tasks in Storyline), so I am curious what the issue might be. 

Hi Callie!

Thanks for sharing these details with us! What you're noticing is not expected behavior when pausing the timeline in Slide View or when previewing the file. It would be helpful for us to take a look at your project to see why the timeline isn't playing from the paused point. I've tested this on my end using the latest update, which is update 43 for Storyline 360. You can watch my test here.

Would you mind either attaching your project to this discussion or you can share it privately with this upload link?

Hello,

I have just started having the problem described here and found this post. No matter where I position the playhead on the timeline, once I press play the timeline starts at the very beginning. Likewise, if I pause the timeline and press play, it goes back to the beginning (as if I had pressed stop rather than pause). So, the only way to listen to any part of the timeline is to play the entire thing and wait for the part I want to hear. 

I have the latest update to Storyline 360, so I'm not sure why it's happening. I tried restarting the computer but it didn't fix the problem. The weird thing is that the problem is occurring only on certain slides. I'm not sure if there is some hidden setting that is causing this bug to occur on specific slides.

Hello Domenick and welcome to E-Learning Heroes 😊

Thanks for reaching out and sharing what you've run into when working on your project.

We do have a similar report that we are currently investigating. The issue is specific to the playhead jumping back to the beginning of the timeline when previewing a layer with a shorter base layer timeline. 

Does this match what you are experiencing as well? That may explain why some slides have different behavior.

• If this matches what you are seeing, I'd be happy to add the details you've shared here to our report.
• If this does not match what you are seeing, then with your permission, I'd like you to share your project file with our support engineers to investigate what's happening. You can share it privately by uploading it here. It will be deleted when troubleshooting is complete.

Hi Leslie. 

You're right! The problem is occurring on a layer whose timeline is a lot longer than the base layer timeline (131 seconds vs. 66 seconds). I hadn't noticed that before you said it. Well, now that the issue is identified, I guess the engineers will figure out how to fix it.

Thanks for your help!

Thanks for confirming, Domenick. I'll get this conversation added to the report as we continue investigating and this will also allow us to share any updates with you here.