Very slow response working with pictures from PPT in Storyline...

May 31, 2013

Frank Bialas
By Frank Bialas

I've had the evaluation version of Storyline on my Dell tower for a few days now.  I had no critical problems with Storyline until this morning when I started working on slides imported from Power Point.  I have a one-slide test imported, with two text boxes, four pictures, animations (fade in  -- fade out) and narration.  Working files are on my PC's hard drive, not on a network server.  Storyline file size for this one-slide show imported from PowerPoint is 6.7 MB!  The whole PPT file for all eleven slides in the show is only 2.93 MB!  Storyline is VERY slow resonding to editing moves on the pictures in this one-slide test piece.  Just to select one picture, I've counted delays up to 3 seconds from mouse click to selection box appearing on screen.  Click and move takes longer; I've counted 4 to 7 second delays from releasing the mouse button after a move to the image moving to the new position.  The Performance Monitor in Task Manager shows high spikes of CPU usage for these events.

System notes:  Running Windows 7, also installed last week, and having no significant  trouble with it after reinstalling the usual applications and browsers. I work in a large, bureaucratic organization (government), with  typical IT and network issues from time to time.  There's nothing bad happening today that I know of.

Help! I need answers soon. I am going to Tom K's workshop in Philly on Wednesday, and would like to have no technical troubles with Storyline plaguing me.

Frank B., Harrisburg, PA

9 Replies
Christine Hendrickson
almost 11 years ago05/31/13 at 8:58 am (UTC)

Hi there Frank,

First, if you haven't already, please try restarting your machine. If it's an issue with resources, that may clear up the issue.

Have you checked the file names of the PowerPoint files and the Storyline project files? Please try to make sure that the files don't contain any special characters - this includes spaces, underscores, dashes, etc.

You may also want to try creating a new, blank Storyline file and see if the same thing happens when you import the PowerPoint content. 

If the same thing happens in a new file, it might be a good idea to try repairing Storyline:

How to Repair Storyline

If that doesn't help, try following the more in-depth steps in the following article:

Unexpected or erratic behavior in Storyline

Let me know if you see any improvement.

Thanks!

Christine

Frank Bialas
almost 11 years ago05/31/13 at 10:43 am (UTC)

Importing that one slide into a newly created blank Storyline project didn't fix it.  BTW, navigation with scroll bars in the Storyline window is itself delayed, just as selection and movement of pictures on screen is delayed.

But, (without rebooting) importing a less complex slide from the same Power Point presentation (little text, one clip art graphic, simple animations, narration) into a separate new project (by using Import Power Point from the Storyline start up window screen) resulted in that one-slide test working well.  There was no discernible delay between mouse click and response on screen.  File sizes of those two individual one-slide Storyline projects are:  the bad one... 6.8 MB;  the good one... 0.9 MB.  Maybe that's a clue.

Frank Bialas
almost 11 years ago06/03/13 at 1:21 pm (UTC)

Resolved, more-or-less, with e-mails to Articulate Support with offending files uploaded.  My problem may be specific to my original PowerPoint presentation that I imported into Storyline.  The PPT had lots of pictures, and most of them oversized to start with.  Re-sizing the pictures and importing the originals into a new Storyline presentation eliminated the problem of slow response to select and move pictures around the screen.  Of course, that means more work than I'd hoped I'd have to do, to resize and import each picture individually.  But, that appears to be the work around for now.

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