Timeline preview is SLOW and jumpy

Hi Cheryl,

It takes 5 seconds for it to start playing, or to play the whole slide? What is the length of your timeline? 

If Storyline is behaving odd or unexpectedly it's worth checking that you're working with all local project files as described here and if this is happening in all your files it's worth going through a simple repair of Storyline. 

Hi Ashley, sorry for the delay in replying. It takes 5 seconds to begin playing.  The slide is 41 seconds long, no animations, no state changes, just images, characters, and audio.

Hi again,

The How to Repair Articulate Storyline article references says to 'Select the option to Repair', however that isn't one of the options presented when I run the installation .exe as administrator.  The options are add/remove, Reinstall, and Remove All. 

Hi Cheryl,

Please choose the Reinstall option if you don't see Repair. 

Please let me know what happens after the reinstallation. 

This was a frustration with Storyline 1, and even worse for me in Storyline 2. It happens even on a clean install. It seems like I spend more time waiting on the timeline preview than I do on making edits. It's probably by design since the slide has to be processed when you use the dedicated preview option for a slide. Would this be better if Storyline was a 64-bit application? 

Same for me here. Just some Graphic-Objects and Audio. All Files are stored on my local SSD. Clean Install on 64-bit Windows 7 Machine. And it takes Storyline more than 5 Seconds, before the Preview starts to play. Very frustrating! A continuous workflow is not possible ...

Hi Hugo and Robert,

Thanks for reaching out here. I know that it's something a few other community members mentioned in terms of the preview speed and shared that as a feature request here, but as you mention Robert some of the delay comes from preparing all the elements on each slide if previewing the whole course, or the individual elements if previewing one slide. 

Thanks, Ashley. I think this is more of a psychology issue instead of a technology issue. We impatient users see a play button and expect it to be instantaneous. When we click the Preview button or use the keyboard shortcut to preview, the Storyline displays that progress dialog, so we accept the delay. 

I think this could be addressed by caching the last preview, but then I suspect that the most recent changes would not be reflected in the instant preview. Oh well.

All good points Robert. I may use the line "more of a psychology issue instead of a technology issue"  often. :-) 

It's just one of Articulate's many shortcomings. Since working with Articulate Storyline for almost a year now, I often say to people in our company, who are new to Articulate: Learning Articulate Storyline is not about learning to work with a new software, it's about getting to know all the little mistakes and strange behaviours of this program and about developing workarounds to get Articulate to do what you exprect it to do ...