Forum Discussion
Having issues getting video/timeline to pause using triggers
First, some background. I created several interactive videos using Camtasia. They are software walkthroughs with hotspots at key points that viewers click to continue the video. I rendered them as SCORM files and uploaded them to my LMS. Users don't like the navigation through the different modules in the LMS, so I am recreating everything in Storyline 360 so it can all be self-contained. To start I simply rendered the video as a normal mp4 video from Camtasia and imported it into a Storyline 360 project as a video on a slide. I added my first hotspot and created a trigger to pause the video when the timeline ends on the hotspot. I created another trigger to play the video when the user clicked the hotspot. It worked perfectly. I moved on and created the next hotspot and set up the same triggers. This time, each time I previewed it, the video paused too early and cut off the audio. I went back to the timeline and confirmed I had the hotspot lined up exactly where it needed to be, but it still paused too early. So I started digging in this forum and found a post that said rather than pausing the video, I should pause the time line. So I edited my triggers to pause the timeline rather than the video. Again, the first hotspot worked flawlessly, but when I got to the second one, nothing paused and the video blew right past the hotspot despite not clicking it. So I dug some more and found I can just set a trigger to pause the timeline at a specific point and not use the trigger at all. Still didn't pause. I then tried adding a cue point and pausing there. Still not pausing. The first instance works, but the second one just blows on by. What am I doing wrong? This seems like it should be such a straightforward issue.
I attached my .story file. This is the last set up where I have it set to pause at the cue point.
6 Replies
Hi, it looks like your triggers aren't set up correctly, except for the cue point.
Change the Name Menu triggers to these:
Pause timeline on this slide / When the timeline starts on Name Menu
Resume timeline on this slide / When the user clicks Name Menu
Then do the same for Predict Preferences.
The Name Menu triggers always worked as is. That's the first one. You said the cue point trigger was set right, but it wasn't pausing. That's the second one.
I did make the changes as you suggested and it still works the same. The first one pauses and waits for me to click, the second one never stops.
This is very weird behavior. I did some further experimenting and only one pause/click trigger worked, no matter if the cue trigger was present or not. It really feels like a bug to me.
Hi CoCo_Cliff,
Thanks for sharing your setup and for explaining everything you’ve tried! I can see why this feels confusing, especially since the first hotspot behaves exactly as expected and the second one doesn’t. And thanks to Silverfire as well for jumping in with suggestions.
When this kind of behavior shows up later in a longer video, it’s often related to how the video’s internal timing syncs with Storyline’s slide timeline. Over time, playback can drift slightly, which can cause later cue points or pause triggers to fire early, late, or not at all, even when the timeline looks lined up.
For interactive videos like this, the most reliable approach is usually to split the video into separate clips at each decision point and place each clip on its own slide. That removes timeline drift entirely and makes pause-and-continue interactions much more predictable. If you prefer to keep everything on one slide, adding a very small buffer before the pause point can sometimes help, though it’s less consistent with longer videos.
If you’d like to dig into this further, you’re welcome to reach out privately through a support case so the team can take a closer look.
Yeah, this is pretty much the solution I came up with. Thanks for clarifying.
