Movie Transparent Alpha Channel
Jul 19, 2012
By
Earl Beede
OK, let me make sure I have this straight, perhaps the community can enlighten me.
-- If I import a .mov movie that has a clear alpha channel into Storyline it will encode it into an .mp4 and I will loose the alpha channel.
-- If I import a .flv that has a clear alpha channel it will keep it unless an HTML 5 request comes and then Storyline will encode it into a .mp4 and loose the alpha channel.
--If I import a .mp4 with a clear alpha channel Storyline will re-encode it and wipe out my alpha channel.
So, the best approach appears to be to forget about movies with clear alpha channels if you suspect that any of your clients don't like Flash. And only .flv works.
34 Replies
I've used this technique in the distant past to good effect. Overlaying the video for non-interactive elements over the top of animated elements works pretty well and offers quite a bit of flexibility for maintenance. The ability to swap out the background is neat.
But it is complicated and modern browsers don't support it (at all). I've since dropped using the overlay and moved to a video underlay with a static background in the video or using an inset when an image / video of the presenter adds value. This works nearly as well, is easier to produce, and less finicky in deployment.
I'm not sure why it wouldn't be working, Heather. It could be an issue with SL2. The first version of Storyline handled alpha channel video well. Early versions of SL2 displayed a black background. Tough to tell if it's an encoding issue or a problem with SL2's video playback.
Hi Aparna,
There is another thread here that talks about some custom options using 3D here that may be of help to you.
Not at all helpful with resolving the issue. I see this final posting is over a year old. Is it safe to assume that SL is still unable to work with Alpha channels or is there a more recent discussion where this same issue is addressed and hopefully resolved?
Thanks.
Hi Pete,
I saw you reach out in a few different discussions, and I did want to point out that Storyline 1 and 2 did support FLV/Alpha Channel as noted here. You'll also see it noted here in this comparison chart for Storyline 360 of HTML5, Flash and AMP.
In any of the Storyline versions, it's not supported in the HTML5 output.
As for Aparna's earlier question, we don't have support for 3D videos in Storyline (alpha or not).
Hope that clarifies!
so no solution after all these talk?
Hi Paul, thanks for chiming in!
Can you tell us a little more about what you're trying to achieve? Also, what version of Storyline are you using?
Biggest issue with this right now is alpha channel video is not currently supported in any browser. So this is less an issue with Storyline (or any authoring tool for that matter) and more an issue with the state of the Web right now. Flash made this convenient since it was built-in to the FLV spec. As far as I know, since there isn't a web video format that supports transparent video, nobody is able to run alpha channel video natively on the web.
There are some computation intensive tricks that can be used to fake it. But it's not at all efficient or reliable and results in frame drops and high CPU usage.
i wanted to like superimpose some animated alpha characters into SL, but with no alpha support, am stuck to gifs it seems?
Hi Paul,
Since the FLV alpha channel transparency is supported in limited environment such as Flash enabled browsers, and Adobe has announced that they'll stop support for Flash in 2020 - it may be more time and cost effective to develop with the GIFs and be able to use the HTML5 output.
I know there are a lot of other folks in the community using media like GIFs and FLV files, so I hope that they'll be able to share some info here too!
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