Can't use good quality video??

Nov 06, 2012

Hey guys, I was previously using Captivate for this project, which could play video just great, no stuttering and I could use high enough quality for what's needed.. The thing is that the entire project is just video, split up into near a hundred slides as many of them are questions.
All of the questions involving highlighted objects or text already in the video from AE makes it just a flat video with buttons being transparent, the only things in addition to the video are mouse-over PNGs of the clickable aspects of it so they can light up (with fading glows in the alpha channel), and full-screen hotspots to prevent the hand icon being on top of the video.

The first problem I'm having is that SL wants to re-compress the footage when publishing, 'full quality' being so bad that it's practically unusable.

I'm aware I can replace the output mp4 files with my own once compressed versions, but it seems no matter what I use that SL has so much extra coding in here for crap we're not using that the whole thing just stutters all the time no matter the quality of the footage (though of-course higher quality footage stutters more).
It's really frustrating that we can't just use it as basic video with no borders and add simply clickable objects, but the clients choice is to use SL instead of CP, so I don't know what I can do.. does anyone have any advice for optimizing this?
I'd like to be using footage atleast 3mbps if not 5 or even as high as 8-10 maybe, but I'm also aware that SL streams it's footage and Java-script cannot be used to pre-load the files.. =/

The footage is at 960x540.. I have no idea how to overcome the problem of the stuttering, which happens even at the lowest quality output locally on my machine here running off an SSD with an i7.. or on any other computer I've tried it on.
Basically it needs to run smooth and in high quality, does anyone have any advice for me, can you tell me if this is possible with storyline?

Thanks for your time,

Tony 

4 Replies
Tony Ganner

Thanks Mike, H.264s from AE on default settings is exactly what I've been using and I can't think of a better way to do it =/
I really don't wanna lower the bitrate under a target and max of 3 either.. but if there's no choice, maybe rendering out at a lower quality would give a better result than SL's re-compression if I replace all the files..?
I've noticed all the outputs on maximum quality vary from 500-140kbps on 1-8 second long clips, but yeah, I really don't wanna drop to anywhere near that bad a quality.. I mean the internet is capable of streaming high quality video, and flash is capable of playing it, I really don't see why I can't do this =/
I want the video to be so clear that compression is un-noticeable to the untrained eye, atleast 6-7mbps ideally. 


Also tried FLVs but the compression is worse and they kept going green at the end in SL aswel as not playing the last 30 or so frames.
Also an issue I'm facing in SL is that the last 2 or 3 frames don't always play with MP4s even though they all extend past their end by a second.

But the quality and playback issues are the most important.

Mel Ruth

I could be wrong, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that most of Storyline's players have issues with video that has transparency, though, does it not?  I think it said that the only player and format that will play video with transparency is Flash; HTML5 and the iPad player can't do it, so I guess it depends on how your users are going to consume the content as to whether .flv with alpha channels will work or just create even more problems.

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