MacBook Pro 15" Retina Settings for Storyline Use

Dec 15, 2012

Just wanted to share some insights into trying to get SL looking OK on the MBP Retina.  I've been fighting settings since I got the laptop and think I have it looking OK for normal use.  Though I have not started developing anything in it yet, it was just to have the ribbon and settings at some kind of readable size.  So this is just a workable setting I have gotten to.

I installed Windows 7 on a Parallels 8 Virtual Machine.  Here are some settings I think are working so far:

Parallels 8 Configuration:

Hardware Video Settings:

Video 3D Acceleration to DirectX9

Enable Vertical Sync

Resolution set to "Scaled"

Video Options Settings:

Full Screen "Keep Ratio"

Use MacOS X Full Screen "Off"

Coherence: Disable Windows Aero, Allow Full Screen, Crystal Mode "Off"

Windows 7 Settings:

I used the classic theme

Set Resolution for display to 1440 x 900

Display personalization to: Smaller 100%

Hope that helps anyone playing around with the same thing.

Now onto seeing how everything works on one machine!

Geo

17 Replies
Mary Lacroix

Thanks -- I've bookmarked this.

George, how brisk is performance on your MBP? I'm looking at an MBP and a Mac Air as my laptop of choice, but the 5400 speed of the HDD on the MBP concerns me given how large and slow my .story files are to load and save on my Windows machine with the 7200 rpm HDD .

I've been considering both Bootcamp and Parallels to run Win 7 on a Mac. What made you choose Parallels?

George Hayman

Hi,

Mary Phil is right and one of the reasons I went with the Retina was that the SSD drive is included.  I do a lot of video and wanted to try and centralize everything into one system.

My friend who is a big geek on this stuff said that Parallels and VMware were pretty much the same, but looking into it, it seems that Parallels had Retina support and most people I know use Parallels.  It also seemed to let you control the allocation of RAM in the VM too.

Bootcamp wasn't a consideration because I want to be able to access files in real time on both sides.

Now, here is the thing.  Windows does not look that great on the Retina.  It is OK but at the full res everything is very small and SL is really unusable because it is so small.  I played with it for a while to get it looking OK and workable, though the screen is a bit blury because of the resizing.  

So it is a trade off but to me it is much better than carting two systems around...

Geo

Mary Lacroix

Thanks, Phil and George. I am just taking the plunge into Macs, while keeping my main Windows machine, and I appreciate the detailed reporting.

I was already inclined to just get a non-Retina MacBook and swap in my own SSD and upgrade the memory, but if Retina display currently doesn't play well with Windows, then I will relax and not even be tempted by the beautiful screens in my local store.

Given how slowly Storyline is running on my Windows 7 machine (i7, 7200 rpm HDD, 16 Gb RAM), I'm glad to hear that it seems to be running well on the Mac in Parallels.

Kris Roberts

Hey all,

I can't seem to get SL to look right on my new 2-week old Macbook Retina (15", 2.7 Ghz, 16 GB RAM) using Parallels 8 and Windows 7.  Any graphic only show a part (upper left corner) and blank for any of the characters.  When I go to preview it, everything is there and looks fine.  But it seems that I would be editing almost blind.  

Below is one test example of screen shots of the 'edit' mode where I can't see much/anything, and the 'preview mode' where it is all there.  I assume from the video tutorials that this is not as it should be.

Any ideas of what is wrong?  I've tried adjusting the display settings.  I tried uninstalling it and reinstalling...  Is it a display coherence problem? 

I'm also in the trial period of the program - does that make a difference?

Thanks for any tips!

Take care,

Kris

Kris Roberts

Update!!  Thanks George!  I found out how to change the Parallels settings and now everything looks absolutely fine!  

If you could do a tutorial on exactly how to make these changes, that would be really handy indeed (it took some messing around and I'm not sure I could re-create the magic....).

Onwards...

Thanks again!

Kris

Ryan DeWitt

Thank you George, I wish your settings worked for me, I cannot get Windows 7, Mac MBP Retina, Parallels 10 and SL2 to work together.  

Win XP / SL1 worked perfectly. 

Win 7 is auto sizing me back to 2880 x 1800 every time I drag my Parallels window to full size. 

I can not use Storyline 2 because it's so tiny :] Frustrating. 

thx in advance if someone can help. 

Ryan

Adriana Bertolani

Hi Everyone! I know I´m a bit late. But I´m having trouble with my MBP and Storyline. I decided to do BootCamp since everyone told me it was better to work with the whole capacity of the MBP in boorcamp with a program like Storyline. Storyline 2 is very very small. Ive tried changing the resolution in windows but it doesnt affect Storyline, it keeps opening very small. Can anyone give me some insight on how to change the setting. I never use windows so I´m kind of lost.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Adriana,

Storyline needs to operate with a DPI setting of 96 as detailed here - which can appear very small on high resolution monitors. Our QA team is aware of this issue and we're continuing to share information from the forums with our team - but you'll also want to look at sharing your thoughts in the form of a feature request here. 

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