Captured video does not fill slide area

My manager wonders if there's a way to crop the screen size to eliminate the white space above and below.

Hi Wayne!

You're correct, this isn't specific to browser settings. What you'd want to look at adjusting is the Story Size.

However, having said that, I always recommend recording from a brand new Storyline project. When you first launch Storyline, you're given an option to start with a recording. When you record using this method, the Story Size will automatically adjust to your recorded content. In my opinion, this gives the best result because Storyline isn't trying to fit your recorded content into pre-defined slides.

What you could do is create a new project and record the video using the suggestion I gave above, then import your other slides into the project:

Importing from Another Storyline Project - E-Learning Heroes

Or, you can work with the content you already have and adjust your current Story Size:

Choosing a Story Size - E-Learning Heroes

Please let us know how it goes!

Christine

Thank you, Christine.

Edited: we have a problem, and since I recommended buying Storyline and I'm the sole developer, it's my problem. Specifically, I've re-captured video from a new project at three sizes (selected window, full screen, and 720x540.) In each case, there is white space above and below the image when published. This is unacceptable to my client. I really need some attention on this, please.

Bump - edited to show image with unacceptable white space.

Do you need to have the menu displaying all of the time? The reason I ask is we ran into something similar and making the menu a button (The menu then will overlay as needed when the button is clicked) rather than always displaying will allow you to display the recording in a larger area, specifically giving you that area on the left back allowing you to reduce the white space above and below as the recording then scales to fit the additional horizontal space. From there it is just a matter of trial and error with the Story size setting Christine mention to get the overall size to a level that is acceptable to your client.

Thanks, Ian. With the menu turned off, there's still white space at top and bottom, although the sides look neater.

.

In the Story Size menu you can try setting it to Custom, unchecking the Lock Aspect Ratio checkbox, and reduce the height. I would play with this until you got a height and width that was acceptable and then re-import your recording. The re-import will adjust the recording to use the new Story Size (unfortunately any work in the prior version of the slides will be lost). We did this a couple of times with our project's first recording.

The settings in this first image are what we wound up using for our project:

You can see in this second image it isn't perfect but the white space at the top and bottom is minimal:

Its just really a matter of playing with those numbers until you get something that works for you. But you definitely want to get the size nailed down before you spend a lot of time editing the slides to avoid rework.

Ian, thank you again. I ended up with 1024w x 480h, which seems quite letter-boxed based just on those numbers, but my client just pronounced herself satisfied.

However, I am surprised that most other users accept such a large amount of wasted/white space resulting from Storyline's standard settings, and then the extra hours of re-capturing video once a good size has been determined. Although I can't search the forum and have to use Google from my browser to search Articulate forums (grrrrr), I still find it surprising that no complaints like mine are showing up.

This is a problem with Storyline's standard settings that almost cost me my job. I chose to waive billing hours for the re-shooting of all this video (I'm a consultant), but this has still cost me greatly in terms of reputation.