Help with poor Storyline compression of animations

Nov 14, 2013

Hello,

I am an Industrial Animator and have been working with Storyline on a few projects over the past year.  Overall I'm pretty impressed with Storyline but there is one area that it really doesn't work for me.  I am considering finding another platform because it is such a pain to deal with.

I've found that the compression of inserted video (real life) sequences is adequate.  If I put the Publish Quality/Video Quality slider to maximum (which should be the minimum, IMHO) then the resulting video in the published projects is not bad.  I wouldn't say its super great but I can live with it.  The problem is that the majority of what I create are animations (yes like a cartoon) and even with the Video Quality slider to maximum the results are dismal.  My clients demand the animations that I create among other things to look really GOOD, CLEAR and up to 2013 STANDARDS.  Plus it just hurts to have spent a month or more of my time creating an animation, then have Storyline make it look BAD!

I'm guessing that the Video Encoder in Storyline has been optimized for real life video and they didn't take into consideration that animations might be used.  I think this would be an easy fix for Articulate to implement but after several feature requests and waiting a whole year it seems that no one is listening.  I've noticed that Articulate Storyline as a product doesn't get many, if any new features.  The change I've requested is to just change the scale of the Video Quality slider..  Easy right!   Change it so the range of video quality increases.  Yes I realize that this will increase my published project size..  I say who cares.  This is 2013 and bandwidth is cheap.  Five plus years ago a 5meg video was a problem for some people to download (some still on dial up) but no longer.  I need quality!  Articulate please, please give us Power users the option to produce better quality projects.

Alternatively Articulate, we could have the option to insert a video/animation with no further encoding/re-encoding done to it!

As a workaround I have been encoding my animations with another piece of software then renaming and replacing the mp4's in the story_content folder.  Thankfully the names stay the same when publishing but it is still a major pain.  I have a LARGE training project coming up in a few months and I will be using at least 50 animations in it.  I'm not looking forward to all the renaming and hassle.  Plus if I hand over the Storyline file to the client then they have to replace the animations if they re-publish.  Confusing for them.

Is there another solution?

Am I doing something wrong?

Or Articulate...  Could you just get your programmers to make the change.  The change could have probably been made in the time I'm writing this question.

I've included a sample screenshot of an old animation and the resulting compression quality.  For a final project I probably would increase the quality of my encode even further.  But of course the Storyline version is stuck looking bad.  Looks even worse when you see the actual animation.  Very blurry in the areas of high motion.

Suggestions?

Sincerely,

Gordon Evans

6 Replies
Bruce Graham

Hi Gordon - yes...others feel your pain.

The workaround is far from ideal, and many of use have been requesting:

1> A "Do not compress my videos" button, and

2> A "Do not rename my videos" option.

Both are a pain, and if SL wants to stay "current", need to be addressed, as the use of videos is exploding - certainly in my client base. If not addressed in a sensible way, soon, I believe this will become an Achilles Heel for SL.

Kevin Hart

Gordan, I wish I could help you out. 

But I really just wanted to tell you that I'm always impressed by quality animation in elearning and the board cutting animation on your webpage is just some really stellar work.   I can't imagine how frustrating it is to see that video get pixelated once it's published. Had that been my work and I was going through your situation, I probably wouldn't have much hair left on my head.

-Kevin

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