Timeline Issues

Question

Hello. I am having problems with a Captivate file. When I preview the project locally, everything shows up fine. However, after I publish and upload it to my webserver, I experience problems. The problem happens on 3/35 slides. On those three slides, the timeline pauses (I see the Play button change) but the imported audio continues to play. However, none of the objects later on the timeline show up. The issue happens on only those three slides, despite other slides having the same components. I can manually click play again and the objects eventually appear, but always out of sync with the narration.

I've tested and this issue happens in Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. Others have experienced this problem, too, on different computers. The problem also happens irregularly: it will occasionally work as expected, but then pause the next 10 times and never play normally again.

I'm stuck and would appreciate any help. I can't share the file publically due to copyright issues but can share it privately if someone is willing to take a look. Thank you.

steve91586674 · Accepted Answer

I have many blogs about the Timeline, one of the most neglected important topics in most trainings and tutorials. As consultant I have solved a lot of issues with lack of understanding of the Timeline, which did lead to my multiple blog posts and some presentations on Adobe Conferences in 2017-19. However that topic disappeared completely again although it is one of the most featured tags in the eLearning community.

Drag&Drop has many small bugs which lead to confusion. I logged all of them since many years, but only one has been fixed:

As you now know, the lack of showing the pausing point in the Timeline panel. It is an automatically inserted pausing point, as also exists for quiz and score slide (and used to exist for interactive Learning Interactions which have now been deprecated). The only way to see its position is in the Drag&Drop panel. My recommendation if you have slide audio (narration) is to edit the timing of that pausing point so that it appears after the end of the audio.
The Failure action is not a failure action but a Last Attempt action, similar to Quiz slides. It is still labeled as Failure action in 11.5. It is only a real failure action if the number of attempts is set at 1.
That failure action was even available for Infinite attempts which was crazy! That last bug has been fixed in the most recent version, it will be dimmed for Infinite attempts. It took many versions since the appearance of D&D for this simple fix.

Sorry for my ranting... fixing those bugs would avoid frustrations and confusion. Pausing the Timeline is already a complicated topic 'an sich' (I am not German, but this is the perfect expression in my mind).

I am out of ideas for the slide for which you showed a photo. Sorry. It needs in-depth exploration which is not possible in a forum.

Hi Lilybiri. Thank you for the clarification on the D&D bugs to keep in mind when creating those slides. I'll also have to go back and look through more of your blog posts on the Timeline. Even after using Captivate for a few years, there's so much that I still need to learn.

As for a resolution to my issues, it appears that my project in question is corrupted, which explains the irregular behavior. @RodWard was able to look at the file, investigate, and see that even adding in other interactive objects didn't pause the timeline as expected. I very much thank Rod for his time and help. And @Lilybiri, I thank you for your patience and clear explanation of potential causes. They helped me troubleshoot in a new way, which I'll carry onto future projects.

Thank you both!

RodWard · Answer

If the timeline is pausing on specific slides then there are only a few reasons this would occur:

There is an interactive object on the slide itself pausing the timeliine.
There is an interactive object on the Master Slide to which those slides are attached.
There is a Pause action being executed by the On Slide Enter event of those affected slides.

To find all interactive objects in your project for a given slide, look at the Project > Advanced Interaction dialog. Find the numbers of the affected slides (in the column at far left of the dialog) and look at which interactive objects are listed for those slides. Any button, click box, Text Entry Box could be pausing the slide.

Are any of these possible reasons for the issues you see in your project?

If your imported audio is continuing to play even when the timeline is paused then that means the audio is not attached to the slide, but more likely attached to an object on the slide. Did you import audio to each slide separately, or did you report the narration audio as background audio? (Background audio by default will continue to play even when the timeline is paused.)

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