best solution for seamless videos

Apr 19, 2016

Hi all,

I have a client who is producing a top-notch animation. At certain points in the animation, the video is going to stop and a storyline interaction will show. After the interaction, the video will start again. From the user's perspective though they should believe that the Storyline interaction is part of the video. So my questions regarding seamlessness are...

  • I have inserted videos onto slides before and at a certain point, Storyline bogs down in saving, developing, publishing and using the course. So I'm wondering if Storyline behaves differently if its a one 20 minute video or 20 1-minute videos. This is not a discussion about learners right now. I promise I'm not going to insert a 20-minute video :). I'm trying to understand this from a technical viewpoint.
  • So when storyline bogs down because of the amount of video in it, I usually speak with the client about using a video host and embedding the videos. However, seamlessness is an issue here because we don't want the user to see a black screen or any visual incontinuity while Storyline calls up the video from a different server. So is embedding even an option.

Your help would be most appreciated. If you done this kind of  "overlay Storyline on top of short videos" work, let me know if there is a different solution. The client must use an LMS because they need to track scores and completion, hence the storyline  aspect.

Cheers,

Julie 

4 Replies
Angelo Cruz

Hi Julie,

Using videos that are hosted on popular websites may be the answer to your issue when saving and/or publishing the course. Although a downside might be the continuity of the video and Storyline, wherein it may depend on the learners connection.

However if you're main concern is the seamless of the Storyline, embedding videos from a file may be your best shot. Yes the file will be bigger in size but your learners will feel that the Storyline interaction is indeed a part of the video.

If I may suggest, you may want to try converting your .mp4 videos (if that's what you're using) to .flv to make the file size a little smaller. Yes you may sacrifice a little quality, but you might just be able to get the best of both worlds.

Hope this helps.

Julie Stelter

Thank you Angelo and Christie for your thoughts! I really appreciate it. The course needs to work on an iPad so Flash is out. I found some very old posts that are relevant to my problem. Simply, I'm going to use one embedded video for each module from an external source such as Vimeo. Using layers and a custom pause button, the user can pause the base slide's timeline and I can pause it too, to insert an interaction. Testing it out shortly. Thanks again! Love this forum!  

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