White screen preview

Jan 14, 2016

When I preview a slide, scene or entire project of any size or number of slides I only see a white screen. This just started occurring. How can this be resolved?

17 Replies
Christie Pollick

Hi, Kasey --  

A bug has been identified in Adobe Flash Player 20.0.0.267 that breaks features in many applications, including Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and Articulate Studio. For example, in Storyline and Studio:

  • You'll see a blank screen when you preview a project.
  • The preview area of the player properties window is blank.
  • The timeline preview feature doesn't work.
  • You can't preview videos, Flash movies, or web objects.
  • You can't edit videos.
  • You can't import Engage interactions into Storyline courses.
  • You can't view courses published for CD.

The good news is Adobe and Microsoft have fixed the issue in recent updates. Follow the steps below for your version of Windows to fix the problem.

Please let us know if you continue to have issues and we'll see what more we can do to assist! :)

Christopher Seger

Is the same bug in Adobe Flash player 28.0.0.137?  It also appears to render the file corrupt, like when I send it to other AS authors, they get the white screen too.  It's odd b/c the flash elements work in timeline view, but whenever a preview is applied, the rendering affects the visuals.  The audio plays perfectly fine, but now visuals, just a white screen.  Help!

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Chris,

This discussion is a bit older - so let's start from the top! 

  • What version and update of Storyline are you using? 
  • How are you sharing the course with other authors?
  • Is it only preview that things don't show correctly, what about publish?
  • Are you able to share a copy of your .story file here with us? 

I'd love to take a look at your course and continue troubleshooting from there! 

Christopher Seger

In order to eliminate the white screen preview and publishing issue, I suspected corruption in some shape or form, so I deleted a quiz element that appears to be the culprit.  It was nothing fancy -  basically a 1 quiz check box with an affirmation statement to confirm a user completed the course so it can send completion data to the LMS.  When I deleted it and re-saved the file, it worked.  I opted for a # of slides complete for the completion criteria.  It's definitely odd, b/c even sending my file to my colleagues resulted in the same white screen preview etc.  When in doubt, use the process of elimination by backing elements out of your story file and see if you can isolate the issue.  It's frustrating for sure!

Christopher Seger

Let me clarify...deleting the quiz element from the original file didn't resolve the issue alone.  I had to run two instances of Storyline and copy and paste over everything I originally built in the corrupted file to the new file except for the slide that contained the quiz element.  I saved it as a new file and the preview and publishing issues went away.  I'd love to share, but unfortunately the material is company proprietary.

Leslie McKerchie

Hi Chris,

Sorry to hear that you experienced an issue with this. That does sound frustrating.

I know finding the culprit can be difficult, but perhaps importing your slides into a new file can help someone that runs across this thread in the future. 

*I would say next time for you Chris, but I'm hoping you don't have a next time.

Thanks for sharing.

Ben Schmidt

I know this is a semi older thread, but I just came across this the other day in SL 360. It ended up being a "corrupted" state change. Nothing out of the ordinary and nothing that I have done before, but I guess this one time it decided not to like changing states (nothing about the triggers). There wasn't an infinite loop going on that might have caused issues. I sent the file to another ID, and experienced the same issue. 

Anyway, came up with a work around and moved on. 

Leslie McKerchie

Hello Petronela,

Thanks for reaching out and sharing what you are running into with your project.

Curious if the issue happens in any course you are working on or just this particular one?

If you cannot re-create the issue in a new course, I would advise to import the file into a new one and proceed.

If you'd like us to take a look, then with your permission, I'd like you to share your project file with our support engineers to investigate what's happening. You can share it privately by uploading it here. It will be deleted when troubleshooting is complete.

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.