Inserting videos that have a shorter duration that the timeline

Hi Leslie, you're awesome for making your Peek video!

I didn't see is how you first inserted the video and (if you) moved it below other objects on the timeline to try to replicate my conditions. I made a Peek video showing a success and a failure of truncating a video on the timeline.

The premise of the issue I'm raising is when somebody forgets to truncate the video immediately after insertion. That moment becomes the only opportunity to do so to take advantage of Storyline "knowing" the video's timing/duration. Afterward, one has to know the length of the video to reset its timing which is a bit cumbersome but not impossible. A person would either have to manually type in the video’s original runtime, or would have to drag the video’s tail to match its actual ending (hard to do, especially with very long videos).

• Imagine a project where videos get edited a few times during development and you have to re-insert a new version (shorter or longer).
• In some of my project’s cases, there may be up to 8 videos per slide, all along the timeline.
• The timelines where me/my client have had this issue can be 5+ minutes long with many assets & videos.

My expectation (feature request?): that Storyline should be able to know a video’s duration, and allow easy resetting of its timing. It shouldn’t “forget” a video’s timing or require me to know or lookup the length of the video to reset it myself.

Going through this discussion, I certainly realize there is a “best practice” for inserting videos and truncating their ends immediately. But this isn’t always known or followed by people, and it's comforting to know that there is (or could be) a quick way to remedy a video's timing to make it its actual duration without knowing its length ourselves.

Grr I am having the same exact problem today Feb 2021

I am having an issue where I try to insert a clip at :22 into a timeline and it instead of having it start at :22, it cuts off the first 22 seconds. It seems like the issues with this has been known about for several years based on this post and yet it hasn't been resolved? That's extremely frustrating. Is there a workaround?

The clip works just fine if I insert it at 0 on the timeline, but no matter which way I try to get it to start at :22, it doesn't - I've tried just adding it into the timeline directly at that point, adjusting the start time by right clicking and going into timing and dragging it and every method results in the same problem.

@Kristi - Good luck.  The main issue is that the Storyline timeline doesn't sync with the video timeline and there is no way to lock them together.  We've fought with this for years.  If you add other elements with the video you'll find that it's nearly impossible to sync the actions with the video.  If you try to use auto advance with a video you'll find sometimes the entire video plays and it advances as expected, other times it advances to early so the video is cutoff or late so the user has to stare at the end of the video for a while before the slide will advance.  The problems get worse if the user pauses the video.

Our workaround is to create videos with all the elements we need in them and just use Storyline as the container for the video for that spot in the course.  Basically, videos are used on slides by themselves, and we don't auto advance them. 

As you pointed out, this issue has been known for at least 3 years, but they still haven't addressed it.  We are considering switching to Captivate.

Hi Scott,

You are correct. The default when adding new objects is to 'Show Until End' so that the timeline will extend if needed for audio/video elements.

If you right click on your video in the timeline and use the 'Timing' option, you should be able to turn off the 'Show Until End' and it will adjust to ending when the duration is complete.

Here's an example of a 30-second video on a 56-second timeline and I added another object as you mentioned, but was able to adjust the timeline for the video to end when the video is complete.

Hey Leslie, thanks for the reply and the helpful animation - that's great! That all makes sense, and matches what was working for me (but there's a "but").

It seems that the option for "Timing > Show until end of slide" is the same toggle (but different UI) as the "Show Until End" option. That's nice to know we can toggle this setting from multiple places.

So the process of changing the timing - if done right away - works. But... I'm finding that if I move the video object in the timeline (such as below other objects), its timing gets reset from the original video duration to the timeline's duration.

1. Add a shape, and set its timeline to be longer than a video that you insert.
2. Insert the video at the beginning. This appears above all other layers.
3. If you adjust the timing of the video now, it will work well and the video's timeline truncates properly.
4. But, if you move the video layer down below other layers, and then try to adjust the timing, the video's duration has been adjusted from its original runtime to a runtime that equals the current timeline's length.

This example matches #3. The duration is the video's original 6.18 seconds.

This example matches #4. The duration is now 18 seconds. This is the scenario that I've run into on projects of mine or of other clients, especially when there are several short videos on a single slide, strewn about the timeline, starting at different spots. Moving videos around, and then trying to truncate the excess time of the video's layer, doesn't seem to work.

I can see that a workaround might entail manually resetting a video's duration. But it would be convenient to not have to look ath up, and do that move.

Any other thoughts or suggestions? Thanks much!

Hey Scott,

Thanks for the additional details.

I followed the steps that you shared and have an additional question. After the duration of the video has been set, why would you change the timing again? It seems that this simply overrides your original setting.

Here are my thoughts in a quick Peek video.

If I wait until all the items are on the slide and layer them as needed, I'm still able to truncate the video to the correct length.

Again, I do see what you are seeing, but I'd like to understand the use-case as well to report the potential impact.

Thanks so much!

Perfect! Thank you, Scott! I'll be sure to pass this on :)

Hi eslie, if this has indeed  made sense, can you confirm that what I'd hope for is *not* currently available in Storyline? If so, I'll follow up by submitting my feature request. Thanks lots!

I apologize Scott. You are correct. It does not seem to be working 100% as you need and I do believe this is a hint of a bug vs. a feature request, but I've submitted this to our team on your behalf. 

This conversation has been attached so that we can pop in to update you here when we can.

I wanted to share some information on how we define bugs and how we tackle them when they occur.