Multiple Animated gif Elements

[paular29882766]

I am working on a project in Captivate 9 and we want to add animated .gif elements such as curved arrows to draw attention to certain parts of the slide. We have the .gifs created and working fine, however, when I use the same element more than once, it will only play the first time in the published project. I tried with two of the same element on the same slide and then on separate slides and only the first one would play. I did find that if I create multiple copies of the same element with different names the animations will play.

Since this project has over 100 slides and I will use the elements on almost every slide, I would really like to avoid have to create hundreds of copies of the same element. Is there a better solution? I have searched various places and nothing seems to address this specific question.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[Lilybiri]

I would like to see the timeline of one of the slides with a GIF animation.  How did you insert the animation? I use to import them to the Library, and drag them on each slide where I need it. They will automatically get a different ID, but it is the same animation, the original name remains the same, those are only instances of the same item in the library.

If you need the animation in exact the same location on slides, import it to the first slide and time it for the rest of the project. On slides where you don't need it you can use the On Enter action of the slide to hide the animation (and maybe show it again on following slides).

The advantage now is that the animation has always the same ID. Disadvantage: needs to be in exactly the same location.

[RodWard]

I believe I have encountered this same issue some time ago on a project where I wanted to use an animated GIF of a checkmark being written on screen.  When I tried to have several instances of the same GIF appear on the same slide, but staggered on the timeline, I found that the timing of the first instance determined what was shown on all the others.  Renaming the GIF files before import to the library was the quickest way to solve the issue.  This was never a problem with the same animation in SWF format.  But it does seem to be an issue with animated GIF.

So I am also interested to see if someone has found a solution, other than renaming the file.

[paulmorsink]

I have encountered the same glitch you described, and the trick of renaming the GIF files before importing them to the project Library and then adding them to the slide has NOT worked for me. With more than one GIF on the slide, all GIFs play fine when I preview, but when I play in browser, only the first GIF is animated. The other GIFs pop in as images, but do not play. It's an issue of priority and number: when I put a different GIF first in the timeline, THAT GIF plays, and whichever GIFs are second, third, etc. fail to play. Any suggestions for workarounds? Thank you!

[Lilybiri]

This thread dates from 2018. Meanwhile you probably are no longer on the same version. Support for animated GIFs, which was great for SWF output, is much lower for HTML output. Example: animation will play even when the slide is paused On Enter. Could you show the screenshot of a timeline for such a slide? 

[RodWard]

One thing I would suggest you test is whether or not the GIFs work if they are set to be looping.  If they were created in an app (e.g. Photohop) and set to play only once, sometimes they have actually finished playing by the time they become visible on screen.  This seems to be a quirk of HTML5.

This inability to accurately time imported animations in Captivate is one of the reasons we developed the CpMate JS Library.  It allows for creating very sophisticated animations in Adobe Animate and then bringing them into Captivate as OAM files.  Then we can time bookmarks in the animation to synchronise with voiceover audio on slides.

https://www.infosemantics.com.au/about-cpmate/

However, this solution might be overkill for your project if all you wanted was a couple of animated arrows.