Timelines

Hi Bob and welcome to Heroes! 

If you have a number of items on one slide but don't want to see them all at once while you're working, have you thought about splitting some of them into layers within the slide? This would allow you to work on those items individually and be less visually distracting when you're working on the main slide. 

Since you're new to Storyline, you may want to review this article that deals with adding and editing layers. Once you set up the layers you need, you'll then need to determine what triggers each layer, and another article that deals with that is here. 

Hope that helps you out and makes your screen less cluttered!

I appreciate your reply Ashley!

I am familiar with the layer concept, but I'm not sure that would work for me as I am always working with long voice-over files which need to have graphics timed to what is being said. I need to be able to preview the slide frequently to get the timing of the graphics appearances right(and I do use the cue points).  If I move my graphics off of the main timeline to layers, then I would need to break up my audio and move it to individual layers as well so it can be timed properly & previewed, then I would need to set up triggers to initiate each layers content appearance chronologically. This sound like an awful lot of work vs.  the obvious solution, which would be to just have the slide elements on the timeline behave as they would in most other timeline-based programs of this sort(after effects, flash, premiere etc) & become invisible when they are not  appearing onstage per the playback head.

Sounds like what I am looking for is not possible currently, so I'll just have to work around it. Maybe you could pass this onto your development staff as a user wish?

Thanks again!

Hi Bob,

If you just want to temporarily hide items while you're working on them just click the eye icon to the left of each item in the timeline. This will hide the item (you just need to remember to unhide it before final publication).

Also, there is a padlock icon too, this allows you to lock down items on the page to help with editing especially when you have a lot of items with overlapping outlines.

Hope this helps

ps: you can click and drag down the 'eye' icons to hide multiple at once.

Hi Bob,

I'm happy to submit a feature request on your behalf. If you have additional thoughts as you're working through you can always submit a request here. 

Please let us know if you need any other help!

Hi Bob and Ashley

I would very much like to agree with Bob, that this is very frustrating and makes timing animations to long speaks a pain, especially comming from a flash and after effects background.

My current workaround is constantly hiding and unhiding layers.

So a request for the viewport to display what is currently active on a specific point on the timeline would be greatly appreciated, and really help my work flow as well. I was gonna submit this request, but sounds like its already been submitted. Would be very interrested in seeing this implemented in a near future,

It's always worth submitting the feature request yourself too, if enough people ask for the same thing the developers might see the value a particular feature could add for users.

My current issue as well in SL2.  I cannot find a way to get audio and graphics to match on the layers as the audio only plays on the base layer and not the layers built upon the base layer.  It is very time consuming to "guess" back and forth on the audio with the base layer and slide layers.

Hi there, Crystal! We're here to help!

Since you started a new discussion over here, would you mind sharing your file with me in that discussion? That way I can take a look at your set-up and make suggestions on what to do next.