Has anyone experienced the slow timeline preview when using the play button in the timeline pane (bottom left)? I have like 4 objects in my slide and it takes 5 seconds for the preview to play.
Thank you, Dean, for sharing your concerns here. I know that we’ve had this issue on our radar for awhile, and there has not been an update to this issue with the release of Articulate 360. We've found that the more items you have in the slide (images, audio, text, shapes), the longer it takes for the play head to move. We continue to share all of your feedback to our QA team, and we’ll post any updates here in this discussion.
I haven't noticed any slowness with the regular preview within Storyline 360 or Studio 360. It is previewing the HTML5 output which is a lot different than previous versions where we previewed Flash always. Are you trying to preview just one slide, the course as a whole, a subset of slides? Presumably you're also seeing this across all your files? If you've already reached out to our Support team, please let me know - but if not we'd want to take a look at the behavior you're seeing!
Duuuuuude.... using Storyline 360...... and whoa, things are SLOOOOOOOOOW.
I pushed the "play" button on the Timeline to preview something - just needed to hear something really fast - and I hit it like a full minute ago and still NOT playing. It's actually much faster to press "Preview Slide", which still took like 30 full seconds to load. I know lots of people are experiencing slow previews, and I get having to wait a little bit for stuff to render and load, but this is MUCH Longer than we've had to wait with past versions of STL. Any reason this might be going on?
Hey Ashley - is this in any course you are utilizing or a particular one? If it's a particular course, you may want to import into a new project, but if it's all courses, perhaps a repair would be helpful.
if I get it right, your main complaint is that previewing in SL2 awfully slow is. I agree, I have the same experience.
Let me point out another thing though about SL2 that drives me crazy as well: realtime preview does not work! If I place the playhead at e.g.15 s on the timeline, why do I still see objects which should only appear between 5-10s? With this it is almost impossible to edit precisely. I always need to preview the slide a thousand times, come back and adjust and preview again.
With Camtasia Studio, my other main tool, I edit the same amount of objects in 10% of the time I need with SL2, there the preview only shows that is present on the screen in the moment where the playhead is.
Honestly, my team is considering to move to another tool... It makes me sad that in Articulate 360 this issue remained.
I agree this has been quite frustrating. I also do video editing in Premiere and After Effects that have real-time preview capabilities. It consumes a ton of time to have to either wait for the timeline to play or keep previewing slides just to figure out timing. I thought this would be fixed in the 360 version of the software since I started in Storyline 1.
Will someone from Articulate please confirm that this is still an issue in Articulate 360? I submitted a case asking the question, and received multiple emails back telling me to do a repair/reinstall.
I don't want to arbitrarily do a repair/reinstall if this is already a known issue.
We do have a similar issue confirmed from a customer file in SL360. I would advise following the direction of your support engineer, as they are from Articulate, in testing so that we can confirm and report as needed.
If you do not wish to do the repair, please share your file with Miker as instructed.
I submitted the scrub/timeline playback feature in the Feature Request area of the website.
It's understandable if "High Level" functions don't work due to needing specialized code when in "preview" mode, but just to playback the basic screen elements LIVE. This feature is Desperately needed. I had this feature in Captivate 3.0 back in 2007, so SL is already a Decade behind this particular curve. (Great product otherwise, but sheesh!)
I agree. This needs to be a feature ASAP. I am a videographer as well on the side and having the ability to scrub through the timeline in Storyline would save so much time, which would in turn, save my company production hours and money.
Thanks for the reply and the welcome. I'll run the repair/reinstall, it just takes a while get permissions to reinstall programs at my company.
I'm still very curious if this issue is expected or not. This can be easily tested by anyone at Articulate by opening a new project, creating three to four slides with animations, and trying to preview the timeline. Judging from the other replies in this thread, it seems like the behavior is expected.
I've replied to Miker to let him know. Thanks to both of you for the help!
I am spending a day just to edit one slide because I have to start from the beginning of the timeline each time to preview changes - this is insane! I moved across to SL360 and was hoping that this was no longer an issue that I had already endured with SL2.
Can someone please fix this issue - the amount of wasteful time spent is ridiculous and try explaining that to a client awaiting product review!
One way around the super slow timeline preview that I've found is to just play the audio file and pause it to note the time stamp at which I want different slide elements to fade in.
For example, if I have three bullet points, I play the audio from the editing pane that opens when you double-click, and I write down when I want the bullets to fade in based on the audio. You can see the time that the playhead is at by looking in the bottom right corner of the audio editing window. Then I right-click on the slide element in the timeline, go to Timing... and type in the time stamp I noted.
In order to preview what I've done (since the timeline playback is super slow) I always do Preview > This slide and publish just that one slide.
I still think that Articulate needs to fix this (a pretty basic function), but in the meantime this workaround has cut down my development time significantly.
Thanks for sharing those steps here - and we do have this reported to our team for a deeper dive into what's happening. We'll let you know here as soon as we have any updates.
This thread is now 2 years old and I am on the very latest build of Storyline 3. The preview delay is just as bad on S3 as it was on S1. Adobe Captivate can do instant preview playback of the timeline. It's time Articulate addressed this issue. It makes Storyline look bad.
Hi Rod. When I opened a support case for the issue, the representative told me the delay was expected behavior and there was nothing wrong. I agree that it is frustrating and have started using the competitor you mentioned for projects that have a lot of movement.
We do have an open issue where we are monitoring this behavior. If you have an example to share (a .story file preferably), that would be fantastic so we can include it in the report. I wanted to share some information on how we define bugs and how we tackle them when they occur, and user impact is a big factor.
If you cannot share it here in the forums, please share here privately.
Hey Tyler,
Thanks for chiming in to share. I see where you previously shared a sample file in your case as well, so I'll be sure to include that as well.
Hopping back in on this thread since I still see the replies come to my email.
I've been using Articulate since SL1 and it's a great program...however, this isn't a bug. The timeline has never allowed real time preview of the timeline...especially if video is involved.
I feel with Articulate 360 that the software is far enough along that this should be integrated and not even considered an additional feature, but necessary.
I come from a background of video editing using Adobe Premiere Pro and After effects and I can preview the timeline simply by pushing the spacebar.
It takes so much time to wait for the timeline in SL to load and not even show in real time.
Likewise for me. The best I've gotten is about 2 seconds of delay, which is still not good enough to be able to sync animations with audio, so I've had to resort to simplifying or eliminating animations from my courses, because it takes too long otherwise.
When I need something with a lot of movement, though, I use Camtasia--a program with real-time previews--and create a video that I then import into Storyline.
I still prefer Storyline to other tools, though, but having a real-time preview like Camtasia has would be an incredible timesaver and value-add.
65 Replies
Preview speed is really slow even without animation, sound and video. It takes four seconds already.
Hi Tw test,
This issue is still with our QA team for additional investigation, so I dont have anything further to add at this time.
Thank you, Dean, for sharing your concerns here. I know that we’ve had this issue on our radar for awhile, and there has not been an update to this issue with the release of Articulate 360. We've found that the more items you have in the slide (images, audio, text, shapes), the longer it takes for the play head to move. We continue to share all of your feedback to our QA team, and we’ll post any updates here in this discussion.
It's worse with 360 because Preview is slow as well and cannot be used as a workaround...
Hi Pierre,
I haven't noticed any slowness with the regular preview within Storyline 360 or Studio 360. It is previewing the HTML5 output which is a lot different than previous versions where we previewed Flash always. Are you trying to preview just one slide, the course as a whole, a subset of slides? Presumably you're also seeing this across all your files? If you've already reached out to our Support team, please let me know - but if not we'd want to take a look at the behavior you're seeing!
Hi Ashley,
Sorry for the delay, I had to install a trial to check and preview is actually OK now, my bad.
I was referring to an older version of SL360.
No worries Pierre - and thanks for coming back around! Glad to hear that SL360 is working out well for you.
Duuuuuude.... using Storyline 360...... and whoa, things are SLOOOOOOOOOW.
I pushed the "play" button on the Timeline to preview something - just needed to hear something really fast - and I hit it like a full minute ago and still NOT playing. It's actually much faster to press "Preview Slide", which still took like 30 full seconds to load. I know lots of people are experiencing slow previews, and I get having to wait a little bit for stuff to render and load, but this is MUCH Longer than we've had to wait with past versions of STL. Any reason this might be going on?
Hey Ashley - is this in any course you are utilizing or a particular one? If it's a particular course, you may want to import into a new project, but if it's all courses, perhaps a repair would be helpful.
Hi All,
if I get it right, your main complaint is that previewing in SL2 awfully slow is. I agree, I have the same experience.
Let me point out another thing though about SL2 that drives me crazy as well: realtime preview does not work! If I place the playhead at e.g.15 s on the timeline, why do I still see objects which should only appear between 5-10s? With this it is almost impossible to edit precisely. I always need to preview the slide a thousand times, come back and adjust and preview again.
With Camtasia Studio, my other main tool, I edit the same amount of objects in 10% of the time I need with SL2, there the preview only shows that is present on the screen in the moment where the playhead is.
Honestly, my team is considering to move to another tool... It makes me sad that in Articulate 360 this issue remained.
Hi Viktor,
Please, read this :
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/scrubbing-the-timeline-actual-view
It's just been three years since I requested this feature... One day maybe...
I agree this has been quite frustrating. I also do video editing in Premiere and After Effects that have real-time preview capabilities. It consumes a ton of time to have to either wait for the timeline to play or keep previewing slides just to figure out timing. I thought this would be fixed in the 360 version of the software since I started in Storyline 1.
Hello,
Will someone from Articulate please confirm that this is still an issue in Articulate 360? I submitted a case asking the question, and received multiple emails back telling me to do a repair/reinstall.
I don't want to arbitrarily do a repair/reinstall if this is already a known issue.
Hi Tyler and welcome to E-Learning Heroes :)
We do have a similar issue confirmed from a customer file in SL360. I would advise following the direction of your support engineer, as they are from Articulate, in testing so that we can confirm and report as needed.
If you do not wish to do the repair, please share your file with Miker as instructed.
Thanks!
I submitted the scrub/timeline playback feature in the Feature Request area of the website.
It's understandable if "High Level" functions don't work due to needing specialized code when in "preview" mode, but just to playback the basic screen elements LIVE. This feature is Desperately needed. I had this feature in Captivate 3.0 back in 2007, so SL is already a Decade behind this particular curve. (Great product otherwise, but sheesh!)
I agree. This needs to be a feature ASAP. I am a videographer as well on the side and having the ability to scrub through the timeline in Storyline would save so much time, which would in turn, save my company production hours and money.
Hi Leslie,
Thanks for the reply and the welcome. I'll run the repair/reinstall, it just takes a while get permissions to reinstall programs at my company.
I'm still very curious if this issue is expected or not. This can be easily tested by anyone at Articulate by opening a new project, creating three to four slides with animations, and trying to preview the timeline. Judging from the other replies in this thread, it seems like the behavior is expected.
I've replied to Miker to let him know. Thanks to both of you for the help!
I am spending a day just to edit one slide because I have to start from the beginning of the timeline each time to preview changes - this is insane! I moved across to SL360 and was hoping that this was no longer an issue that I had already endured with SL2.
Can someone please fix this issue - the amount of wasteful time spent is ridiculous and try explaining that to a client awaiting product review!
One way around the super slow timeline preview that I've found is to just play the audio file and pause it to note the time stamp at which I want different slide elements to fade in.
For example, if I have three bullet points, I play the audio from the editing pane that opens when you double-click, and I write down when I want the bullets to fade in based on the audio. You can see the time that the playhead is at by looking in the bottom right corner of the audio editing window. Then I right-click on the slide element in the timeline, go to Timing... and type in the time stamp I noted.
In order to preview what I've done (since the timeline playback is super slow) I always do Preview > This slide and publish just that one slide.
I still think that Articulate needs to fix this (a pretty basic function), but in the meantime this workaround has cut down my development time significantly.
Hi Marcin,
Thanks for sharing those steps here - and we do have this reported to our team for a deeper dive into what's happening. We'll let you know here as soon as we have any updates.
This thread is now 2 years old and I am on the very latest build of Storyline 3. The preview delay is just as bad on S3 as it was on S1. Adobe Captivate can do instant preview playback of the timeline. It's time Articulate addressed this issue. It makes Storyline look bad.
Hi Rod. When I opened a support case for the issue, the representative told me the delay was expected behavior and there was nothing wrong. I agree that it is frustrating and have started using the competitor you mentioned for projects that have a lot of movement.
Hi Rod,
We do have an open issue where we are monitoring this behavior. If you have an example to share (a .story file preferably), that would be fantastic so we can include it in the report. I wanted to share some information on how we define bugs and how we tackle them when they occur, and user impact is a big factor.
If you cannot share it here in the forums, please share here privately.
Hey Tyler,
Thanks for chiming in to share. I see where you previously shared a sample file in your case as well, so I'll be sure to include that as well.
Greetings!
Hopping back in on this thread since I still see the replies come to my email.
I've been using Articulate since SL1 and it's a great program...however, this isn't a bug. The timeline has never allowed real time preview of the timeline...especially if video is involved.
I feel with Articulate 360 that the software is far enough along that this should be integrated and not even considered an additional feature, but necessary.
I come from a background of video editing using Adobe Premiere Pro and After effects and I can preview the timeline simply by pushing the spacebar.
It takes so much time to wait for the timeline in SL to load and not even show in real time.
In my opinion, this feature should be a priority.
Likewise for me. The best I've gotten is about 2 seconds of delay, which is still not good enough to be able to sync animations with audio, so I've had to resort to simplifying or eliminating animations from my courses, because it takes too long otherwise.
When I need something with a lot of movement, though, I use Camtasia--a program with real-time previews--and create a video that I then import into Storyline.
I still prefer Storyline to other tools, though, but having a real-time preview like Camtasia has would be an incredible timesaver and value-add.