Too many screen captures crash Storyline previews

Sep 12, 2012

James Brandwood
By James Brandwood

I have finally replicated the fault that causes flashplayer to crash when you preview slide, scene or project. I'm not including the timeline preview as that just crashes for fun if you use it a few times.

I know this has been mentioned in other threads (these ones - http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/14684/85390.aspx#85390 and http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/13695/87021.aspx#87021)

where we though in the end the crashing must be due to a corrupt file, if flash player was all up to date, but it is not a corrupt file that does it. There is either a limit to how many video screen captures you can take and put in the one slide or a limit to how many video edits yo ucan make in the one slide. I don't think this is a file size issue, rather a how many issue.

On my current project I have taken 10 screen captures that when put together make the one tutorial. I usually break my captures into stages to help with editing if UAT want changes (saves time). These all work happily on their own in a slade but I find when I put a few together and do some edits to them that the preview timings may be out (a video set to start at 8 seconds shows at the right time, but is about 8 seconds in when it starts and thing like that)

Then put about 6 screen captures together with video edits, run the preview and then select a point back on the seekbar it crashes (with the exclamation mak).

Add some more screen captures and going backwards or forwards on the seekbar will crash it.

When I put 10 together, preview won't even start it just comes up with the exclamation mark and the only way to preview is to publish the project and even then using the seekbar can crash flash player.

I've now done this three times with new video captures on new projects. Please note there are no interactions placed in yet and no audio just video.

So yay - figured out why it happens and Boo - knowing why doesn't fix the problem... unless I don't use the put the videos across a number of slides, but then yo ucan't use the seekbar, well not just one seekbar. 

I would love to hear if anyone else can replicate this problem or can find away to work around it. Please note the videos are between 4 seconds and 20 second in length.

6 Replies
James Brandwood
over 11 years ago09/12/12 at 10:00 pm (UTC)

I thought I had a wok around to this problem, but it failed.

Simply the idea was to take the 10 video captures from the one slide, disperse them across 4 slides - keeping the timings from the one slide, so that once the animations and audio are added it can be copy pasted back on the one slide and the timings would be set. (you'll notice if you copy something out of a slide and paste it into a new one Storyline will put it on the same position, in seconds on the timeline).

The problem being that slides 3 and 4 of the scene I made with the dispersed slides crash when you preview as a scene (they're fine as an individual slide).

I am uploading a new project for the 10-video slides and dispersed video scene. If anyone has any ideas as to why these crash I'd love to hear about it.

James Brandwood
over 11 years ago09/13/12 at 8:23 pm (UTC)

I have reviwed the way I am taking these screen captures ( http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/18537/103984.aspx#103984 - Thanks again Justin) and have managed to take out all of the edits.

I am now able to put together 8 screen captures and run the preview without flash player crashing. This only works once however - if you use the seekbar it crashes and if you press replay slide/scene it crashes.

The preview does jump around sometimes and seems to skip over some sections but this at least means I can do a preview without having to publish the whole project and it would also seem to prove that it is the number of videos not the number of edits that cause Storyline to crash flash player.

Would  still love feedback on this.

James Brandwood
over 11 years ago09/17/12 at 6:13 pm (UTC)

Hi Peter,

I have logged a ticket. This is currently causing me a lot of delays in my work so it will be great to get a response.

I guess I must be doing things differently to everyone else since noone else appears to be experiencing this problem. It's a bit funny that I try to avoid downtime doing edits by breaking tutorials into more editable parts but end up causing myself downtime.

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