Video assistance /advice

Oct 16, 2017

Good evening everyone.

I am currently developing an instructional video and would like some advice. There are 12 videos all with instructions to using new emergency mobile devices.

Can you put four videos on one slide or would you recommend two video max on one slide?

Cheers

Sandy

 

4 Replies
Alyssa Gomez

Hi Sandy, thanks for your question! You certainly can add 4 videos to one slide, so really it comes down to your design preference.

Can you tell us a bit more about what you had in mind for this course?

  • Do you plan to display the videos side-by-side on one slide?
  • Any reason why you want to include more than one video on a slide as opposed to using separate slides?

 

Walt Hamilton

In reality, if things appear and disappear on the computer monitor, nobody except the designer knows if they are two objects on one slide, or two slides with one object each. <Rant on> This is a left-over from the old days of actual transparent film slides. People who talk about the number of slides are still thinking using that technology. With modern technology (to me anything newer than 1980 is new technology), we should be transitioning to talking about slide clutter. Slide number is an absolutely useless piece of information.<Rant off>

If you can transition your client (or whoever) from thinking about slide numbers to thinking about things that actually have an effect on learning, you will have gained something valuable. If not, this certainly sounds like a client that should fall into the higher price tier, for a number of reasons.

At a minimum, if they give you the freedom to make this decision, I suspect you will choose the method that results in the quickest results, which may be important to them. Sometimes the choice between one slide or two hinges on nothing more weighty than what's easiest to create.

If you can get them to forget micro-managing slide numbers and intelligently discuss slide clutter, object sequencing, ease of use, program responsiveness, system performance, and portability (to name some important considerations), you may have a client worth keeping.

To answer your question, videos that play when a slide or layer starts and triggers that are set to fire when the media completes (as opposed to the media reaching a certain time point) are generally easier to handle, and take less time to build around. They are less prone to mess up your timing, if there is a buffering lag. At least when there is a lag, they will mess up only the timing of the objects on that one slide or layer. To me personally, one video per slide or layer is almost always best practice.

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