Pausing timeline when pausing a video

Aug 10, 2012

I just noticed that when a video in a slide is paused the timeline keeps moving along.  It does not pause in unison with the video control pause.

I have some screencasts that I made and inserted into my project.  I added some zooms onto the slide, so that there would be some good closeups on stuff in my screencasts.  When the user stops the video, the zooms continue to display, which looks totally crazy. 

Then, when the player resumes the video, the zooms have finished playing and the user no longer has the benefit of any video closeups.

Is there a way for me to get the whole timeline to pause whenever my user clicks pause on the video controls?

Thanks,

Gillian

55 Replies
Vicki Kunkel

I know it has been over a year since you posted this, but.....Bravo, Andre! Thanks so much for this, as it's the only solution that works for interactive and game-based videos where synching annotations isn't the issue, but rather overlaying interactive game elements (elements that do different things to the characters, the scene and the game scoring) are important.  Hopefully in future versions there will be an intuitive, easier fix. But for now...YOU ROCK!

Lacey Cribb

Hi Leslie,

I have this working now, I am not sure what I was doing wrong but at least it is working!  One other issue I am experiencing with David's hot bar and seek bar solution is:

- I have a layer show up at a certain time in the video  that requires interaction to resume the video (I added a resume video button to the layer that will activate once the learner completes the interaction); however, if the learner clicks the play on the seekbar it will resume the timeline and the layer will stay there.  Any thoughts?  I really like the hot spot and seekbar solution but if I can't disable the play button somehow when showing the layer I will have to add pause layers to all of my slides instead and remove the seekbar.

Lacey Cribb

Hey there, so I did this and they can still click on the play/pause button on the seekbar.  I put an example slide here to show you what I am trying to accomplish. Let me know if you have any ideas!  Otherwise, I will probably remove the seekbar and do the play/pause layer with a added button.

Leslie McKerchie

Hi Lacey! Thanks for the example and further explanation. The seekbar for the base layer is still applicable for the layer and I think I misunderstood previously. Your workaround for this situation sounds good. Although with the base layer showing through and the user still needing to access the layer looks good with a video as well, unless the information is pertinent to that 'time' in the video of course.

marina r

I am having trouble adding shapes on top of a video I embedded in storyline 2.  I created a video that explains how to use a certain website, and I am trying to add rectangles and lines to point out certain actions I make in the demonstration.  However, everytime I pause the video to add a shape, the video goes back to the beginning scene, and the slide shows all the shapes in that slide.  Though I could figure out when I wanted to add shapes, I can't figure out where to put them, because each time I pause the video in the timeline, the video and slide just go back to the beginning.  Is there anyway to stop this from happening?  Or is there another way to accurately add shapes to a video?

Thank you,

Marina

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Marina, 

The timeline preview has been something that users have shared has not worked as expected or as they'd prefer so we've shared that feedback with our product team. Perhaps instead of using the timeline preview you may want to look at gathering the time stamps from the "video editing" set up within the Video Tools tab on the top ribbon. That way you could use the time stamp  of the video to match up with the timeline element. 

marina r

Is it possible to change the settings on the video so that it pauses in the current frame instead of going somewhere else?  I guess I'm just not sure what is happening, otherwise, I would continue searching for a way to work around it.  It seems like other people have been successful at annotating their videos in storyline, adding shapes to point things out during a narration), and I was just wondering how they did it since I assume they would have the same issue.  

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Marina,

Thanks for sharing the link here. I can't say for certain that the whole video was created in Storyline (kind of the joy and beauty of Storyline, you can make things look however you want!) but I know the timeline preview is something that users have reported inconsistent results with and that's the element we've shared with our QA and product team to look at how to improve. In the meantime you may want to look at if any other programs are open and causing an overall memory issue - as I know other users have shared that having a lot of programs running in the background can make Storyline run slower. 

Julie Stelter
André Rodrigues

I think I can help. I did it this week

You can create a layer without nothing on it an call this layer like "pause_timeline"

Than u set this layer config to pause base timeline when the layer is show.

Now, everytime u call the video player to pause, u call the layer too. :D

Here an example attached

In this example I made some buttons OUTSIDE of the stage just to call other layers and hide other layers in a specific time.

So when u reach 5 seconds of the video you will see a marker and if you click on it, it will pause the video AND the base timeline (because I call the "pause_timeline" layer)

At 10 seconds the marker desapear, at 15 seconds a new marker apear and at 20 seconds desapear again.

Check out Andre's unique solution to a common problem of pausing the video on the base layer. It is brilliant!

Greg Brown

I don't know if there's a better thread for this, but the issue I'm having is not necessarily that users are pausing my embedded media, but that they're switching tabs, which for some reason paused the MEDIA but does NOT pause the timeline. So if they switch tabs, the video pauses, the timeline continues, and then when it reaches the end (or any triggers with cue points), they fire off and possibly move onto the next slide.

I saw elsewhere that we cannot turn off the "pause while not on active tab" feature, so I'd love to know if there's another solution to this problem.