Making Objects Appear more than once in the timeline

[JCCloe]

Question:  Is there some way to have an object appear and disappear multiple times in a timeline without having to duplicated it and place it on a new row in the time-line?

Situaion:    I have two animated gifs I am using during a 4 minute audio exchange between two speakers. I want one gif to play as one person speaks and the other gif to play as the other person speaks.  It's the same thing showing up over and over again.

Current set up:   I have 28 duplicate gifs on one side of a slide (all alighned) and each one has audio file attached to it. I have another 28 duplicate gifs (all aligned) each with audio attached for the other side of the slide. I then moved each gif to play in sequence going from one side to the other. 

Issue: I hate the gigantic timeline with 60 little pieces plus all my other elements on that slide. 

Other thoughts for clarification: 

• I realize I could build a 4 minute gif in Photoshop and try to time the delays and various frames but that is too tedious.
• I also realize I could possibly space the audio out with edits to make it sound off at intervals matching my gif/gifs. (again tedious)

[Stagprime]

Is everything automatic or does the learner interact with something to switch speakers?

Hmm... if it is automatic - I would probably play with a little JavaScript timing that would simply show one and hide the other at the proper times. This may also be a bit tedious to determine all the timing changes in the conversation but it would clean up the timeline considerably.

If there is learner interaction to switch speakers, you could attach the show and hide actions to those.

Personally - I would go with some setTimeouts in JavaScript. You only need about as many as your speaker changes.

They are much faster to copy and paste with a quick adjustment of the time element than to go through all the clicks needed through advanced action. GUI.

[Stagprime]

You could probably also work the timing through the advanced actions using a series of delay actions rather than the JavaScript.

[JCCloe]

Thank you for the reply. I have a generic response that fits in my reply to "RodWard" below.

[chrismay_at_delta]

Or you could throw your audio and images into a video and put that on a slide. Then you can be sure the images show at the correct time in respect to the audio.

[JCCloe]

This seems to be the best answer. I don't know JavaScript and the advanced actions work but they are not controlable with the play function in the overal module. (they don't stop if the end user pushes the pause button)

[RodWard]

This sort of thing can certainly be done with JavaScript (if you know how to program it) but why not just use SHOW and HIDE actions separated by Delay Next Action By the number of seconds required to make the effect sync with the timeline?  Standard Captivate functionality can get you a long way.

[JCCloe]

Thank you for the reply. I don't know how to program JavaScript unfortunately. I have applied advanced actions to a multistate object and placed delays between the states to accomplish what I want. Unfortunately if the end user uses the play button to pause the captivate module it only stops the audio and the advanced actions continue on their own. I have addressed this in another thread and it looks like my only solution according to the few responses is to either learn JavaScript or to create a video with the audio and graphics combined to imbed into the captivate module.

[Gaanf]

You might just want to hide the Playbar on that particular slide only, so the learners can't pause the slide. You can show it again on the next slide.

[JCCloe]

Yes. I thought of that this morning. Thank you for the reply.

[Stagprime]

I admit that this came to mind. I always remove the default playbar myself but I had it in my mind that you wanted them to have the ability to pause.