Developing a training cd

[TheMatrix]

Hi All,

I have developed a few training materials using Autoplay, but now I'm having a wee bit of a problem. The material I have completed before have consisted of a small number of videos, less than 20 per training cd.
The training material I have to complete now, is 20+ topics per cd, and each topic can have between 1 and 20 videos associated with it.
The training templates included on Autoplay are no good to me, as I need to keep for example the 20 video topics on one page so that students can select from them.
Anybody any idea of what is the best way to do this, as I'm running out of ideas. The best idea so far, and it aint that good, is to have an ordinary page, and then links on the page to the videos, but I don't think it will look good enough.

Thanks,

Anthony

[Corey]

Re: Developing a training cd

Having 20 video files per page might be hard to keep on top of. It might be easier to stich them into one single video and then use cue points to launch sections. Maybe not, just a thought...

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[Lorne]

Re: Developing a training cd

If you don't need to change anything else about the page to fit each topic (like different artwork, or images, or whatever), you could handle this all on one page with a couple of list box objects.

One list box object to select the topic, and another to select the video. The Topic list controls what items are in the Video list, and the Video list controls which video is loaded into the media player object on the page.

If you want the videos to be accessed sequentially, so the user can't jump to 6 before 3 or something, then you could replace the list box with a "Next Video" button, or something to that effect. (You could also combine the two, and have the "Next Video" button add another item to the list box, so they can always watch the next video or any of the videos they've already seen.)

You could also just do 20 different pages, each one with a different "look" to match the topic, and still use a list box object to select the videos on each page.

[TheMatrix]

Re: Developing a training cd

Thanks for the comments Lorne.
That idea sounds good, what I would really like to complete, but I don't know if its possible, is to have a list of videos on one page, and if a user views and finishes the video, that it automatically goes back to the video list page and have like a check symbol beside it so that the user knows that they have completed that video.
Don't know if you can do this, but as I will be having a lot of videos it would take away any confusion as to what has been completed and what hasn't.

[Lorne]

Re: Developing a training cd

Sure, you could do that. You'd need to keep track of which videos have been shown -- either by storing a list of the names in a variable, as a delimited string, adding to it each time a video is shown...or by using a bunch of different variables like %Watched01% and %Watched02% etc. and setting them to True as each video is shown...or, if you make it so the user can only watch the videos in order, then you could have a single variable that basically holds the index of the last shown video, or the next one to show, or whatever.

To do the actual check marks, just make two different images -- one for the "checked" look, and one for the "unchecked" look -- and use some IF statements to determine which videos have been shown (using the variables I mentioned above), and then show or hide each checked/unchecked image accordingly.