How to Make Your Video Work on All Screens
Modern audiences need to be able to access their content on multiple screens with as little resistance as possible. Thankfully, Verse was built to handle most of that stress for you by taking your high-resolution video and converting it into many different resolutions. Also, the player itself, along with all its interactive features, will scale to fit mobile, tablet, or desktop. These features help always keep the experience dynamic and seamless, but there is one area where occasionally the player needs your help.
Verse is a responsive player so you’ll notice as you change the size of your browser, that the player adapts to the shape of the browser. To best preserve the look of your visuals, the player will compensate with horizontal or vertical bars. There will be some cropping and the technology defaults to protecting the center of the screen. If that doesn’t work best for your imagery, we provide users with a feature to compensate for this called “focal points.”
Focal points are manually set by the user to let Verse know the most important parts of an image to preserve. To access the focal points, click “Edit the Focal Point” on the thumbnail of a video in the CMS. One of the best places to illustrate the importance of focal points is in a Q&A chapter. With Q&As, the question menu takes up about a quarter of the screen so Verse crops your video to make room.
When you select “Edit Focal Point,” a window will appear with a crosshair. Move the crosshair to the most important part of the image. If you look below, you can see the effects of focal points.
Other neat places where adjusting focal points can help are on your cover loop and menu buttons. Verse designed the cover to always fill the screen regardless if it’s in a vertical–like on a phone–or horizontal orientation. We want your stories to be as inviting and dynamic as possible to a user. It’s important that you set your focal points on your cover images to ensure the viewer is seeing the best part of your imagery.
You’ll notice that for all your chapters, you can select a cover image. Cover images are used as the images for your chapter buttons, and in some mobile displays. Images in the chapter menu are taken from the cover image of each chapter. When you choose a focal point, it lets the Verse player know how to properly crop the image for the various display options.
Lastly, for more advance users that will be using fixed sized embeds. Focal points are important to set as some cropping will occur to fit the embed to the size your website needs. Focal points are an extension of Verse’s goal of helping you create dynamic stories that can be viewed and experienced anywhere, on any screen
