Help with screen resolution

[Noel_Griffiths]

Captivate v5.5

I have a 19" monitor.

My screen resolution is 1280x1024.

99% of my Captivate projects are full screen images and recordings taken from my company's website - a track/trace/freight management application.

In order to capture my company's website and all subsequent pages whilst avoiding ISP's menu header, i.e. Mozilla Firefox menu header etc, and also avoiding the task bar at bottom of screen I have established the recording area for my projects needs to be 1260 x 883.

This works just fine for me but I wonder if a project of this size is going to cause any problems to my learners when they view this via the company LMS on their screens ?

As a global organisation with over 63,000 employees there is going to be a wide range of monitors and screen resolutions.

Given my project was created at 1260x883 what min screen resolution should I inform my learners they need to use in order to ensure they can view my projects without scroll bars / problems ?

Really appreciate all/any help (simple language please) in this area as whole area of project size, screen resolution, screen size etc totally baffles me.

Noel

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Hi Noel

That's the continual problem we face. How to adequately capture what is needed and ensure a quality experience for our end users.

Do you have anything that tells you what your end users have available or what the common denominator is for their screen resolution? If so, I would cater to that.

As you likely know, the best possible result is to record at a size where the end users will play it back at the exact same dimensions. Oftentimes it's guesswork. Or possibly educated guesswork.

If you record at a larger size, that means that when the user plays it back, one of two things will happen (depending on the output type you selected and how you are allowing them to play it back).

One thing that may happen is that the user may see scroll bars that force them to scroll to see the hidden parts of the video. While this may be annoying, the fidelity of the video should be pristine, as nothing is being scaled.

The other thing that may happen is that the user may see degraded quality as the video is scaled to fit their viewing space. The extent to which things degrade is entirely dependent on how much scaling is occurring. The larger the difference between recorded size vs available size is what determines how much quality you sacrifice.

Hopefully this helps... Rick

[Noel_Griffiths]

Hi Rick,

Thank you very much for such a quick and easily understood reply. It helps a great deal.

The fact that you did not jump up and down and ask what the hell are you doing trying to record a project at 1260 x 883 was a relief!

I plan to get some people around the globe to test my 1260x883 project and establish what they see and what monitors/screen resolution etc they have.

Given we have so many people in the company it is not possible to cater for all - but hopefully will be able to suit the majority.

Thanks again,

Noel