Syncing Animations With Audio Using Play Head And Cue Points

Audio Transcription

Hello and welcome back to the fourth section in Articulate Storyline training series.

In the last video, we have seen how to modify the timing, duration and order of the objects using timeline. In this video, we will take a look at the two elements of timeline – Play head and Cue points which are perhaps the most used while synchronizing audio in Storyline.

Let’s see them with the help of this sample slide.

So, I went ahead and added some audio to synchronize with the objects on this slide. We can re-position the play head by clicking anywhere on this timeline scale. Now, if I click this play button, our slide starts playing from this point. Apparently, you would want these bullet points to appear in sync with the audio. To do so, we can quickly press spacebar in our keyboard or, click pause button when the audio starts reading the first bullet point.

As we can see, the play head is re-positioned to the point where the first bullet should appear. Now we can right click on the first bullet point and select, “align to play head” option. This will set the “start time” of this object to the time where the play head is currently positioned.

Once done, we can click play and repeat these steps to synchronize rest of the slide. In this way, using play head simplifies the synchronization process. Combining cue points with the play head can even simplify our work.

To add a new cue point, we can either right click on any object in timeline and select create cue point at play head or, press “C” in the keyboard.

So, let’s reset the play head position and click play. This time when audio reaches the point where an object should appear, instead of pausing the timeline, we can simply press “C” to add the cue points.

Once done, we can right click on each object, select “Align to cue point”, and then select the respective cue points to sync our objects. In this way, we can use play head and cue points to sync animations with audio in Storyline.

These cue points are not just used to sync animations. There are many other clever ways we can use them. For instance, we can attach triggers to these cue points to do an action when timeline reaches this cue point. As these cue points can be dragged, we can change when the trigger must be fired without making any changes to the trigger itself.

We will see this in detail under the triggers section. With this we have come to the end of this video. In the next video we will learn how to modify the audio and video files in timeline.