Best Practices?

G'day guys

The last Storyline that I built was composed of ten individual scenes and around 270 slides. Many of the slides held with custom built Flash .swf animations, audio and compressed video. The project size (unpublished) was 400Mb: once published, Storyline crunched it down to 182Mb (SCORM 1.2 course) and 139Mb for a standalone version (.exe).

Having developed a number of eLearning products over the years, I'd consider this course to be 'very large' with respect to it's structure and sheer number of individual screens.

A second project, although structurally smaller (19 screens) held 18 individual screens with 5 min full-screen video files on each.

Storyline coped with both projects easily.

I would suggest that you need to put adequate thought into your compression settings for the various media types BEFORE embedding them into a Storyline file. Storyline will re-compress, but as with any multimedia product, you need to work as economically as possible at all stages of development.

Some users mention Storyline cracking under the pressure of loading 1Gb files....I'd suggest that most software would buckle, or at least degrade, working with files of this size.

A user mentioned the experience of operating in 'Story View' and seeing al lof the little screen icons flickering/flashin constantly - I have experienced this on a large course when I used my mouse scroll wheel to zoom out to quite a high level on a  large course. Net result was that I couldn't operate Storyline and had to force close it. Needless to say, I don't do this anymore  

Cheers,

Jim

www.artofjimbo.com