How to resize a whole project and have it work right?

[nick777]

I'm using a 20 inch widescreen monitor, but not all of our customers are. How can I set it up to change all my movies in my project to a different size? If I change the movie properties, it will shrink the background bmp, but it won't shrink the bubbles or reposition them accordingly. How can I get this to work? I'm using Flash output, by the way.

[RamonS]

I haven't used Mimic in a while, but based on what you describe the additional items such as bubbles are anchored at a pixel position, which means that if the position is 126,73 then the bubble will keep that anchor even when the point it used to be at moved when resizing the background. Sounds like a feature request to me.
Until then you either have to find someone who knows how to do it, rearrange the components by hand, or buy all your customers 20 inch widescreen monitors.
I don't know if you had any minimum requirements for the software / project, but it usually makes sense to limit the size and the screen resolution to the minimum requirement. That may be something pathetic like 800x600, although I guess these days the still pathetic 1024x768 is the going norm. Besides that, you also want to determine if the movie is supposed to fill the entire screen. So you usually have way less than the full screen available for the movie, especially when you add that into help.

[nick777]

how can i edit the code for the page to resize the videos after its created...if I view the code in the viewer, it shows the size there, so how do I change it, either in flare or mimic?

[nick777]

So, do I have to choose between scaling a video down and making it look poorly for people with lower resolutions, or creating it in a low resolution and making it look poorly for people with modern monitors?

[RamonS]

THAT is the question that keeps the TW awake at night. And the answer is probably "depends". It depends on what is more likely to be used by your customers. When it is mainly smaller non-profit organizations that depend on donated computers then the smaller resolution is probably the better way to go. If you deal with Haliburton then we tax payers surely paid them to have the big screens. In the end you can't please both unless you offer two (or more) sizes and the user has to pick which one suits best the current setup. So the tossup changes from pleasing a majority or doubling (n-tupling) your workload.
It appears to be again a case where a management decision cannot be avoided by using software.

[CharlesJet]

So, do I have to choose between scaling a video down and making it look poorly for people with lower resolutions, or creating it in a low resolution and making it look poorly for people with modern monitors?

All of this means that the 20" real estate is not necessary. Demos work best optimized to the screen size of your viewing public. Back in the day, we used to do surveys on the viewing audience of a video. Sometimes you can get this info from an IT department who has stats from an internal intranet. Other times you can get it from AWStats (linux utility) or something along those lines. As for testing the correct demo sizing, there is a free utility called Sizer which (ahem) has been around for some time. In fact, some really really super sharp eHelp employee recommended it for including within RoboDemo back in the day.
http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html

This small utility really helps when you need to quickly check a corporate firewalled system's available browser size without fully installing Mimic. Ask IT's permission first, then install this little .exe from a USB thumb drive.

1) Find out the default screen size, the default browser window options,
2) subtract the address bar and other stuff on the top of the window,
3) Use mimic or sizer to show the proper display size and you won't have slider bars show up on the right or bottom of the display as well.

You can do this in Mimic - just open two browser screens, position one on top of the other one, manipulate it to fit the browser displayable size and take a quick shot. The resulting screen size is what you need to tailor your demo screens to.

Next step would be to go ahead and test four or five screen sizes. Test them, as in ask people whose opinions matter to your project what they think of the different sizes.

My example: I was looking at YouTube and finally caved to peer pressure and got an account. Sizing my screenshots to the YouTube display means optimizing resolution for one of two sizes. We'll see how that all works out.