Saving Time with Web Objects & Lightboxes

I have learned and learned and learned from hundreds of you on this discussion board and finally, I feel I have something to contribute that just might save someone a significant amount of time.

It's specifically around Web Objects and Lightboxes.

Bringing a web object into your story is a great way to add another dimension of fun into your project and depending upon how you use it can be a real show stopper. In my most recent project, I was in dire need to minimize file size, due to many videos in my story and decided to link to the large video file sizes on my external drive, rather than in my story.  The solution? A Web Object.  Of course, that sounds obvious and is relatively simple to do.  However, trying to figure out the size of your web object is where the time gets away from you.

For me, on this project, I decided to have my user jump to my web object as a Lightbox, rather than a regular slide. Sure, let's add more trial and error to get the right size now for the web object.  

Here's a good place for you to start, should you find yourself in a similar situation that hopefully will save you some time. Keep in mind, this for using a web object for video purposes.

1. If using Storyline 2 to create your web object for a video and easily provide you with a story.html file you can change to an index.html file, size your story as 586 w X 440 H. This way, you won't have the scroll bars on the bottom and on the side of your published screen, but you can have the seek bar option selected for the slide you insert your video. This way, your user can scroll through the video (if it doesn't already have that option) on your output web object. You can then insert this as a web object into a standard 720 x 540 story size into a standard slide.

2. If you are doing the exact thing above, but instead of inserting your web object into a standard slide you want the user to jump to a Lightbox slide, then size your web object story to 535 w x 368 H. This way, you can still keep your seek bar to move through the video and you won't have the drreaded lower and side scroll bars in your published web object, which visually tell you your web object is too big.

Unless I missed an Articulate Heroes post somewhere among all these thousands of awesome posts, this took me a couple of hours to do for option 1. Then, when I published to a Lightbox, I had to start from option 1 story size and trial and error it down to option 2 story size.

If this saves one person the 3 plus hours it took me, without thinking it was going to take me this amount of time, it would be worth 3 plus hours 10 fold!

Thank you to everyone here on the discussions boards.  You are all awesome!!

Happy Storytelling!