Screen Resolution

[henrys_court]

Hi,

I want to record a single movie that can be viewed at 800x600 and 1024x768 screen resolutions.

Users with 800x600 have to do a lot of horizontal and vertical scrolling to watch movies recorded at 1024x768 resolution. While the movie itself contains a lot of horizontal and vertical scrolling if recorded at 800x600.

What screen resolutions do people normally record at?

Is it possible to create a single movie to display well at 800x600 and 1024x768?

[CatBandit]

Hi henrys court,

quote:

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What screen resolutions do people normally record at?

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How high is "up"?

quote:

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Is it possible to create a single movie to display well at 800x600 and 1024x768?

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Depends on what your definition of "... display(s) well" might be.

"henrys court", I'm not being a wise-a** (well, maybe a little) but there really IS no "normal" recording size (though I'm partial to something like 700x520 myself) ... and to your second question, wouldn't it be better to just create a sample movie for the 1024-768 display, then resize it yourself ("Movie > Resize Movie") for a 800x600 display, and decide for yourself? You are relying on the opinion of others for something that we are not qualified to decide for you.

Having said all that, I'd point out that some backgrounds are more "scalable" than others, so major resizing may be no problem for some situations, while even minor resizing may completely ruin others. Compare resizing a project with lots of text in the background, say, a text-heavy web-page, with resizing a project where the only background is going to be an image of blue-sky, or moving race-cars (which are expected to be blurred). Hope you get the idea.

[henrys_court]

I find this response belittling.

I was asking a reasonable question as a novice user and was not expecting a patronising response from a community expert.

[mo]

henrys court, I agree with your assessment. Bummer, that.

As for screen resolution, I usually record for 800 x 600, with my actual size being usually 85% of that or so (to take browser interface window/buttons, etc. into account, so the final size would be 680 x 510). I have found that resizing any movie down doesn't work at all; the resulting movie is horribly fuzzy and unreadable. What I do is set up my application window (the one I want to record) to my preset size and then do a Captivate from it.

And as for having a single movie display well at two different sizes, I don't think this is possible. If you set up a smaller movie (say 680 x 510) and remove the size specification in the HTML file, it should resize automatically to fill the window if the user's screen resolution is larger (1024 x 768), but it would look pixelated. One solution that I'm thinking of off the top of my head is this: It might be possible to create two movies (two different sizes), and then use JavaScript in the HTML file to detect the user's screen resolution and display the proper size movie. If anyone else has done such a thing, I'd be interested in hearing whether it was feasible and worked!

[SShipe]

henrys court,

I think that mo@tufts did a good job of explaining things, but thought I had a tidbit or two...

The reason that resizing is difficult to get acceptable results is due in large part to the fact that graphics in Captivate are bitmaps and not vector based....hence, sizing up causes that pixelated look and sizing down causes that fuzzy look since bitmaps subtract or add pixels during the resizing process. The reason that the html file has a size parameter is to endure that the actual .swf file plays a the defined size for best results. What is deemed acceptable seems to be somewhat subjective so you may need to play a little to determine if removing the size parameter and or resizing from within Captivate is acceptable to you. I avoid both since I seldom find the results acceptable for what I need to do.

If you are familiar with html, you can get a bigger area to view your movie than 680x510 (somewhere around 790x540 I think) by using a link to launch the html wihout all the buttons and menus (no chrome). The properties are defined for the link so that the resulting window doesn't have any unwanted items which leaves a bit more room for the movie itself.

[CatBandit]

mo@tufts,
Okay, if you really are interested as stated, yes, you can create a Java-script that checks the user's display resolution and offers a variety of tasks depending on the display. This route can be a lot of work, but ...

An example is on my web-site ... if you wish, goto ...
(pcabcs.com/realtour > Using pcabcs > Getting started)

... you won't have any trouble stealing the basic code from there, and you can do the modifications to make it fit your needs.
.

[MalcolmPrist]

Hi henrys court,

Have you looked at Jesse Warden's Captivate Movie Player? It has an option under the Preferences menu to Scale the Content.

This may be a solution depending on what you are trying to achieve.

Here's a link http://dev.jessewarden.com/captivate/flashcomponents/main.html for you to have a look.

You can download the player from here http://dev.jessewarden.com/captivate/captivateplayer/CaptivatePlayer_1.1.zip

hope this helps.

Malcolm

[CatBandit]

Malcolm, Jesse's CPlayer option (scaling) will automatically change the SWF size as the HTML document size changes, but that does not alter the fact that the Captivate movie is still "warped" after changing its native size. It is still the same old bitmap vs. vector issue.

But your idea is still a good one - all other things being equal - because when you turn scaling "On" in Jester's Player, although the quality of a re-scaled movie will be worse by exactly the same degree as if you used the "Movie > Resize Movie" feature, Jesse's simple one-click option does save you the trouble of creating multiple files for mulitple browser window sizes, and all the other work involved in resizing inside Captivate.

Have a nice day!
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