Black Bars
Nov 04, 2021
Hello,
My Storyline file starts with a video. I have a cover photo in place within the Player settings as a thumbnail for the video. No matter what size I change the image to, (I've tried several aspect ratios) there are still black bars showing up on the sides of the thumbnail once I import it into Rise. Is there some trick to this? A specific image size? A specific aspect ratio? The black bars are certainly hindering my design and need to be fixed asap. What's the trick to getting rid of them?
8 Replies
Thanks for reaching out, Christopher!
Sounds like you might be seeing the border of the Player. I tested this out myself, and I see the same black bars on each side of the cover photo. I found this neat trick courtesy of our very own Tom Kulman that helped me get rid of those pesky sidebars. He even created a recorded demo 😊
I'm excited to hear if this trick will work in your design!
Thanks for the reply Becca, but unfortunately I already have the player completely invisible. All menus and controls are off. The only checkbox I have selected within the player is the Cover Photo. Both my story size and Cover Photo image are 1920x1080. I even tried changing my image size multiple times trying to get the image to fit without the black bars appearing, but couldn't. Once I import the Storyline file into Rise, those two thin black bars appear above and below the Cover Photo.
Thanks for testing this with me, Christopher! I tried Tom's trick myself, and while it does hide all bars for the video, I see them at the top and bottom of the cover photo now.
This isn't something I see we've run across yet, so I'd like to bring it to my team to do some further testing. Any chance you could share your file with us privately to test out sizing specific to your image?
In the meantime, I'm hopeful some community folx will come up with some ideas!
Me again, Christopher 😊
I see that our support engineers worked with you and have logged this as a possible bug where a cover photo shows black bars at the top and bottom regardless of cover photo dimensions and when the player controls are disabled.
Also, I wanted to let you know that we're tracking a feature request to maximize cover photos when embedded in Rise 360 courses to eliminate those black bars.
I've added this discussion to both reports, so you'll get notified when we have any updates!
Related Resources:
Hello,
any news about this problem? Did you fix it?
Thank you
Hi, Valentina.
While this feature hasn't made it on our feature roadmap yet, this discussion is connected to the report, so we'll be sure to notify you when we have news to share.
I'd love to see this fixed as well. Actually, what would be ideal would be to remove the need to click a "play" button to get the Storyline embed to load. Just let it load! This is really messing with the usability of my course.
Hi, Logan.
The play button is browser-dependent: if there's a video or other media on the first slide of your Storyline project, some browsers will allow autoplay, and some will require user interaction.
You can read more about it here: