Inserted Video Quality is Compressed and Awful! Why is "No Compression" Disabled?
Oct 17, 2023
Hi there,
I have a course that features many screen recorded videos. Occasionally I need to crop & resize videos to improve their presentation on my slides & layers which I do using Storyline's video editing facilities. However, any video I crop then displays with a crappy resolution in Review and final output. And I'm unable to switch "Automatic Compression" of my cropped videos to "None"!
When I don't crop or resize a video, I can choose for it to be automatically compressed or left with no compression ("None"):
But as soon as I fiddle with a video's dimensions using the crop tool, the Compression control suddenly limits me to Storyline's Automatic compression of the video:
... which means that a video that should display like this:
instead displays like this:
which is headache-inducing and bl**dy awful visually!
I have tried cropping videos in other video editing tools, e.g. ClipChamp, and then inserting them into my StoryLine project - but some Storyline cropping is always required for fine tuning and/or to eliminate the black space filler around such imported videos.
The only workaround that doesn't give me a headache is for me to use a video editing tool like ClipChamp to export each video in a dimension that is close to how I need its contents presented in my course:
And then I use background-coloured retangles to mask out the unrequired black space filler. Yes, very faffy, fiddly and f'unprofessional!
I would much prefer to simply crop videos in Storyline and turn off Compression!
Dear Articulate, can you please accept this as a feature request (bug fix?)?
7 Replies
PS: These are .MP4 videos in 1080p format.
Hello Christiana,
Sorry to hear that you ran into this snag. I wanted to share that we are currently monitoring a known issue where the compression setting of a video automatically gets greyed out when using Storyline's trim function. If you used the trim function to edit your videos, this is most likely what caused the compression setting to become grayed out.
The identified workaround is to edit your videos in Replay 360, and then import them back into your Storyline 360 project. I've added this ELH post to the bug report so we can notify you as soon as a fix is released.
Let me know if you need help with anything else!
Thanks for replying Jose, but I'm cropping my videos not trimming their play length (if that what's the bug is related to).
Thanks for the clarification, Christiana, and I'm sorry for the mix-up! The bug report does test for the Trim function, so I went ahead and tested on a new Storyline project with a video. I confirmed that the bug also happens when using the Crop function; the Compression setting also gets greyed out.
Since the Trim and the Crop functions are part of the Edit Video functionality, I've added your observation to the existing bug report; thanks for this! We'll notify you of any changes; in the meantime, here's a peek into our process:
Please let me know if you have any questions.
your video is 1080 and what is the size of the slides - significantly smaller than 1920 x 1080 ?
if yes - than the bad image quality is unfortunately normal
storyline is scaling down the video to the slide size - if compression = Automatic
Hi Jurgen,
Thanks for the above. I’ll see if presentation sharpness improves if I generate videos at a lower scaling, and then crop them.
Kind regards
Chrissy
modify and finalize your video complete outside storyline* and compress it to the final web quality as 1080p
then set Compression to "None"** and don't use the storyline crop function anymore
the difference in quality (compared to "Automatic") is
when the course is displayed on a regular computer monitor
* e.g. with handbrake
** = Storyline no longer changes the video during publishing