Flashing story view slide thumbnails

Feb 25, 2013

Anyone mind explaining this one for me??? (See attached video)

This occured eariler today when, in storview, I duplicated a scene and then used my mouse scroll wheel to scroll from the bottom of the Story view to the top. It now wont stop doing it. Closing the storyline file seemed to stop the problem but as soon as I duplicated a scene or scrolled to the top of story view it started again. Now its doing it as soon as I open the file.

This is resulting in stoyline slowing down to an eventual halt and crash, which results in any work done after the my save being lost.

Has anyone experienced this issue or can shed some light on it?

It boggles my mind the amount of new problems and bugs that crop up on a daily basis whilst using this program!

Related support case number is 00320785

26 Replies
Christine Hendrickson

Hi Andrew,

I apologize for the delay. Thank you for sharing the case number. I do see that Gren is working with you on this and that he sent a response earlier today. I just wanted to check in with you to see if you received his message. If not, please try checking your spam folders or filters with your email. If you're still unable to find the message, please let me know and I'll try to have it sent out again.

Thanks!

Christine Hendrickson

Welcome to E-Learning Heroes, Suzanne!

I'm not sure if the suggestions sent by our support team resolved Andrew's issue, as I haven't seen a response from him on the case. I'm not sure if he missed the message, or if it fixed the problem for him. 

Here's what Gren suggested he try:

First, try restarting your machine. This refreshes the system and usually resolves erratic issues when working with Articulate software (and other software as well). 

In addition, when creating, editing, or publishing a Storyline project, be sure you're working from your local hard drive (typically your C: drive). Working from a network drive or a USB drive can cause erratic behavior, such as file corruption, an inability to save changes you've made to your project, and loss of resources. 
  
Please review the following article for more information: 
http://articulate.com/support/kb_article.php?product=st1&id=cw6rhkr2xpxr 

If your Storyline software is still not working properly, a simple repair may fix the problem.  Please review the following article to learn how: 
http://articulate.com/support/kb_article.php?product=st1&id=zibo784o5b2e 

Restart you machine after repairing Storyline to complete the reinstallation process, then test the software again. If the issue persists, please carefully follow the troubleshooting steps in this article: 
http://articulate.com/support/kb_article.php?product=st1&id=gdz9t4lj0g7w 

 

I wasn't able to find a support case for your account, though I'm not entirely sure you submitted a case for this. Looks like you may have tried some of the suggestions in another thread. 

Can you try the suggestions above and tell me if you see any improvements?

Thanks!

Andrew McKay

Hello all,

Apologies for the lack of a response on my behalf; being part of a large organisation certainly has it's short comings when it comes to getting software reinstalled!

Unfortunately reinstalling this did not fix my issue. I don't know if it's just wishful thinking, but it seems a *little* better, but im still waiting upwards of 10 minutes to open the file because of this flashing thumbnail problem.

Suzanne, if youre having the same problem, and your file is also large, then I would suspect that the issue is down to file size. I'm sorry i can't offer any solutions to getting it fixed, but hopefully the people at Articulate could look a little deeper into this issue and come up with a fix further down the line.

As for now, try and develop the patience of a saint, grit your teeth and bear it I'm afraid!

S. Yu

Hi everyone,

Has there been any updates to this issue with the flashing Story view slides? 

When I duplicated a Scene in my large file (about 300 slides), that is when the flashing started. My file froze eventually, and when I opened it to the last save, it opened fine. I duplicated the same scene and Story view was flashing again. Closed and re-opened, duplicated a different scene - same problem. Eventually I figured out that as long as I stayed away from Story view and just copied and pasted the slides in Slide view, it worked fine. I was able to publish as well. 

I was able to save and close the file, making sure to have a Slide view open. Now, I'm trying to open it again but it is stuck on Story view, flashing and frozen. 

Any new developments on this issue? Thanks! 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Christine Hendrickson said:

Here's what Gren suggested he try:

First, try restarting your machine. This refreshes the system and usually resolves erratic issues when working with Articulate software (and other software as well). 

In addition, when creating, editing, or publishing a Storyline project, be sure you're working from your local hard drive (typically your C: drive). Working from a network drive or a USB drive can cause erratic behavior, such as file corruption, an inability to save changes you've made to your project, and loss of resources. 
  
Please review the following article for more information: 
http://articulate.com/support/kb_article.php?product=st1&id=cw6rhkr2xpxr 

If your Storyline software is still not working properly, a simple repair may fix the problem.  Please review the following article to learn how: 
http://articulate.com/support/kb_article.php?product=st1&id=zibo784o5b2e 

Restart you machine after repairing Storyline to complete the reinstallation process, then test the software again. If the issue persists, please carefully follow the troubleshooting steps in this article: 
http://articulate.com/support/kb_article.php?product=st1&id=gdz9t4lj0g7w

Hi S. Yu,

Did you try the steps previously mentioned by Christine above to ensure you're working with local project files, and then conducting the repair steps? 

Also, what update of Storyline are you using? We're currently on Update 5. 

S. Yu

Thanks for the tips, Ashley and Christine. I had put in a support case and Christine had figured out that importing the whole file into a new file was able to fix it. 

What I noticed is that it does allow me to open the file again, but once I minimize the majority of the Scenes in Story view, the flashing starts again and eventually the file freezes. If I leave most or all of the Scenes maximized, then there is no flashing. 

So this import fix does work, just not 100%; however, I am still grateful for where the file is at now. Thanks! 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi S. Yu,

Thanks - I see your case with Christine and that the import resolved it on her end, and I'm curious if you reviewed her most recent reply where she also mentioned:

When creating, editing, and publishing Articulate Storyline courses, be sure you're working on your local hard drive (typically your C: drive). Working on a network drive or a USB drive can cause erratic behavior, such as file corruption, an inability to save changes, and loss of resources. 

See this article for more information: 
http://www.articulate.com/support/kb_article.php?product=st1&id=cw6rhkr2xpxr 

You should also make sure the directory path to your project files and your published output is less than 260 characters (for example C:\Articulate). 

Avoid using special characters, accents or symbols in your file names (this includes spaces and underscores). 

Additional information regarding "Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces" in Windows operating systems can be found in the following Microsoft article: 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

I typically do my titles with leading caps to make them easy to read and remove any troublesome characters or issues - like "MyStorylineFileNameIsThis.story"

Granted, I've seen a number of files with spaces or underscores - so I don't think it's always an issue. Vague, I know.  Let us know if you're able to check into the file path as well. 

S. Yu

Okay, I saved the file onto my desktop (for a shorter file path) and took out any special characters (including underscores and spaces) and the problem with the flashing still occurred. In fact, it seemed to occur in the same spot for minimizing Scenes in Story view as it did when I was duplicating Scenes in Story view. 

That is to say, I had originally wanted to duplicate four scenes. When I reached the third scene, no matter what order I duplicated them in, that was when the flashing would start. The file I tested this on right now had all 4 Scenes I had been trying to duplicate (I got it to work by copying and pasting in Slide view, and leaving all the Scenes maximized in Story view to avoid this flashing problem). After copying a version onto my desktop and making sure to remove any special characters in the file name, I slowly minimized the Scenes in Story view. When I got to that same point (2 of the 4 new scenes minimized, and clicked the 3rd to minimize), the flashing began again. 

Since I have the workaround, I'm in no rush to have this issue analyzed; however, if there's anything else I can do to help, please let me know.  

Leah Kruger

Hi all,

I had the exact same issue (crazy blinking in Story View freezes everything) and found this thread so thought I'd add my two cents!

In the end, expanding all of the scenes in Story View completely fixed the problem. Something about having a huge file with fully minimized scenes (it's 400 MB and 23 scenes long) seems to be causing the blinking blitz. I had already tried repairing Storyline, was working from my C: drive, etc etc etc, and was about to give up (and cry!) when I read the thing about the minimized scenes causing issues in large files.

Hopefully this can save someone else some headache too!

Q Man

Just started having this flashing issue when I tried to copy a scene. All the thumbnails are flashing. It seems to be related to the size of the file and the fact that all scenes are minimized as stated above. New projects work fine. Older projects works fine. The file will not open completely so that i can try to expand the scenes. The progress bar stops a quarter of the way in. I am working locally.

Any suggestions will be appreciated and save hours of lost work.

Jackie Van Nice

This just happened to me too - in a Storyline 1 file. I expanded all of the scenes and the flashing stopped, so fingers crossed the file hangs in there. (This thread was a huge help.)

Funnily enough, after I expanded everything I tried to get as much of the course in Story View as possible (since it's tougher to work with it with everything expanded) - and as I reduced the Story View size all of the thumbnails started flashing again. I increased the view size and it appears to be OK - but thought I'd add my experience here since it sure looks like there's an issue with reduced thumbnail images rendering in large files.

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