Responsive Project Slide Timing

A movie always has durations, whether you have controls or not. Typical for Captivate is that the timeline is shown per slide, not for the total movie. You seem to be confused about the timeline panel, which is perhaps the most important panel of Captivate. If you have a button, it will appear for the length of its timeline. Normally the movie playhead starts at the first frame and proceeds at a rate of 30Frames per second. It will only be stopped when it bumps on a 'Pause'.  Such a pause can be created by inserting an interactive object (like a Next button), and in that case it will be visible in the timeline of that object. A Pause can also be created by an advanced actions triggered by any of the available events. If you have a basic knowledge of the design of Captivate (or Flash or a normal video application) the question to turn off timing has no sense at all. Sorry, don't want to insult you, probably you have been proficient with other applications, but new to Captivate?

If you try to explain what you want to achieve really? You want that eLearning course to work like a presentation or a book: user has to click each time to see another slide? Here is a work flow, do not bother about the default slide duration but:

1. Go to the Main Master slide in the Master slide panel
2. Insert shape buttons for Next/Back
3. Indicate in the Properties panel, Actions tab for at least one of those buttons to pause the slide.
4. Attach the proper actions to the buttons: Go to Next Slide or Go to Previous Slide

Now all slides using that main master slide (only exception could be the Title slide, but you can add the shape button to that master slide as well) will have those buttons, and they'll pause at the end of each slide, whatever its duration. Do not forget that you can have different objects entering the slide at different times by staggering their timelines, then synchronize that with a VO.