Size of an individual project

Apr 21, 2015

Hi all.

Quick question please.  What is the practical size limit for a Storyline 2 project?  I am busy creating a course that consists of twelve different modules, each of which contains around three to five scenes.  Is it feasible to do it all as one single project, with each of the modules being just another scene within the greater whole (with one generic scene upfront controlling access to everything else through a menu / table of contents), or will that just make the whole thing too big and cumbersome (could be up to 60 scenes altogether)?  I'm currently developing each module as a separate, unrelated project, but it would be nice to have them all forming part of the same project if at all workable.

Thanks!

8 Replies
Trina Rimmer

Hi Graeme. I've seen many discussion threads over the years on a maximum size for Storyline projects and as far as I can tell, it varies based on the computer being used.  I see no reason a file can't be several gigabytes if you are using a computer with good processing speed and memory. I've personally worked on a project that had over two dozen scenes with anywhere from 5 - 20 slides per scene. The project file in that instance was quite large (upwards of 550MB), but still stable and published fairly quickly. 

In case you're curious, the minimum operating requirements for Storyline are listed here.  Let us know what you decide to do and how it goes.

Graeme Foulds

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond!  I feel encouraged by your reply, so I'm going to be brave (well, maybe not, as I'm still hedging my bets by keeping my existing work to date safely separate!)  I've thus decided to create a new course, copy all the separate modules that I've created as individual projects thus far into the new one as scenes, rework the navigation elements and see how far I get.  Should be interesting if nothing else, and if it doesn't work, in the spirit of Thomas Edison at least I'll know what not to do in future!

Rachel Barnum

I would be hesitant to do that many modules at once. I've attempted to do exactly what you're doing before (even the exact same amount of modules), and it led to many crashes and really overall being difficult to work with. We all had pretty good computers but it continued to happen. This *was* in SL1, but I'd be hesitant to try again in SL2. 

Will you be loading this into an LMS afterwards?

Graeme Foulds

Oh dear, that is pause for thought.  The intention is to make the course permanently available as an online reference source, so yes, I will be loading it into an LMS when done.  I spent the whole of yesterday building a new overall course to hold and link up all of the individual modules, but if the final product's just going to cause hassles then I'll happily scrap the project and sacrifice one day's work in order to avoid endless troubles and frustrations further down the line.  So you think it's not really worth trying?  Thinking about it as it now stands though, even generating the preview for a single scene takes a good 20 - 30 seconds to complete, so I can only imagine how taxing a 60-odd scene final product is going to be on  the available IT resources.

Phil Mayor

I don't think from a resources issue you will have a problem.  My concerns would be the LMS can you use Scorm 2004 as this course would overload the bookmarking data in Scorm 1.2 and users would not be able to resume.

Also from a user perspective completing smaller modules will be much more satisfying than a huge behemoth of a course.

Graeme Foulds

Okay, I hear you - although the users won't be "completing" the course as much as referring to it when needed as an online reference source.  In that regard, having everything in one single course would make it a simpler reference source for them to use.

Nevertheless, I should probably park the idea and continue developing stand-alone modules until I can get some some clarification from our LMS gatekeepers as to what they are proposing as the maximum size for SCORM purposes (our company has only just started using Storyline as a tool, so we haven't that many official guidelines in place yet).

Nancy Woinoski

It makes sense to development them as stand-alone modules. It makes the projects easier to work with and if you ever experience any file corruption or loss you won't lose everything. You can always import the individual projects into a single Storyline file if you decide to go that route in the end.

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