Best Project Size for Scaling to Big Screens for Presentation

[rickpech]

Hello! I'm curious if there's an optimal project size in Captivate 9 to use when presenting a course that will be displayed onto a large screen for a presentation. I built the course at 1280 x 720 with several different .mp4 videos embedded at that same size. It looks great on my Macbook, but I just want to make sure it will scale properly for the much larger screen. I'm using Captivate 9 and the course is a Blank course.

Any suggestions on how I can ensure the best possible quality?

Thanks in advance for all your help!

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

Since Captivate is designed to be generally viewed inside a browser you can use a tool like http://howbigismybrowser.com/ to determine what the best size will be to design to. Keep in mind that for items such as images the larger you go the larger the project becomes. This will have an effect on project playback performance. When you publish the project make sure to select HTML Scaling so that the course size will adjust to the browser window in use. This way your project will scale down to smaller window sizes if necessary.

[Captiv8r]

LOL, when I saw the thread title yesterday, I was thinking they were planning for screen sizes similar to movie theaters or for conferences with yuge projection systems.

[Lilybiri]

Large screen doesn't necessarily mean bigger resolution. As most trainers I often struggle with projecting systems that have a much lower resolution than my very small Surface Pro, although the screen is BIG.

It is not necessary to play a Captivate published project in a Browser. I mostly will save it as an interactive PDF (provided it is fully installed with the Flash player plugin), which allows to present Full Screen, no need for a browser.

[ramyarrajshetty]

Hi Lil,

Can u please suggest me a best project size for captivate 2017?

Most of my projects are viewed in the browser/.

Thank You in advance!

Regards,

Ramya R

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

There is no ONE size fits all that you can use.  You need to do some research and define your target audience better.

Are they all on desktop monitors? If so, what screen resolution would be the minimum size across all users?

Do you need to accommodate users on mobile devices such as tablets?  If mobile devices ARE a big part of the audience, do you REALLY need to support mobile phone screens, or could you just go with the same average screen size that would work for both tablets and desktop users?

All questions you need to be able to answer.  Your specific target audience may not be the same as anyone else's.

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

To further what Rod is saying, there is no secret size here. I'm working on a series of modules for a client that will be delivered to users using iPads. In this case the screen resolution I'm using is 1024 x 698 (1024 x 768 minus the screen space used up by the browser). But it's important to know that this is only one use case.

As an eLearning designer or developer, part of your job is conducting a needs analysis. Included in that analysis is asking the question "what device are people going to use to consume this course?"

Once you know the answer to that question you will have an easy time selecting a screen size for your course design.

[John_Meidl]

I am wondering if it is OK to select a Captivate project size that is something other than the default options (see image). For example, one course builder here used the size 1000 x 627. From reading Paul's post above, I suspect that it is OK to specify a project (course window) size that is different from one of Captivate's default sizes.

- Jan

[K-Flo]

You can specify just about any size you want to. It’s generally easier if you specify it ahead of time. Otherwise, you might end up spending a lot of time moving things around if you decide to change later.

[Lilybiri]

Very important is choosing the correct width-height ratio. You have to be aware that rescaling, especially upscaling will always result in quality loss. When choosing resolution, take also into account the pixels needed by the browser or the LMS, by the TOC if you use it in separate mode (extra 250px) and the playbar if you use it (height depends on the chosen playbar).