For MP4 videos intended to fill the Storyline display, what thoughts or recommendations are there for an optim pixel width x height? Is the correct aspect ration 3:4?
This is a tough one. There is no one right answer for what you are asking. However, the usual format resolution for .mp4 is 720x480 (with a PAR of 0.91).
I think maintaining the PAR is much more important than sticking to an specific resolution. You are bound to have some letterboxing one way or the other, so avoiding Pan&Scan techniques while keeping the source resolution intact should work best most of the time. Also try to have no letterboxing within your video (let each devices' player handle that).
Also keep in mind that certain aspect ratios do not encode well (or even not at all) especially with mp4 (usually because of the PAR).
Naturally you will get much better results encoding from uncompressed AVI, but there are file size considerations (a 75 second full HD uncompressed video can be as big as 15GB).
The default slide size is 720x540 (4:3) but you can change that to any size you like. Just got to Design > Story Size and set a new size. Best to size your project before importing graphics, videos and so on.
You don't need to resize your videos before importing into Storyline. Storyline will auto-resize videos (larger than slide size) to fit in the slide. If the aspect ratio of your slide and imported videos are the same, the imported video will fit perfectly in your slide.
Are you looking to fill your slide with video? Or, just trying to insert a video into a slide along with other elements? That's really what will drive your optimum sizes.
So Storyline has a DAR of 4:3 which was my understanding and like Presenter, Storyline can be viewed full-screen on a display if published with that option. My take on this is to go with 720x540, and the mp4 compression should keep the bandwidth requirements reasonable.
I was unable to find any reference to altering the PAR in my video editors, so I'm not sure how that is handled or is it even preserved in a mp4 file?
3 Replies
This is a tough one. There is no one right answer for what you are asking. However, the usual format resolution for .mp4 is 720x480 (with a PAR of 0.91).
I think maintaining the PAR is much more important than sticking to an specific resolution. You are bound to have some letterboxing one way or the other, so avoiding Pan&Scan techniques while keeping the source resolution intact should work best most of the time. Also try to have no letterboxing within your video (let each devices' player handle that).
Also keep in mind that certain aspect ratios do not encode well (or even not at all) especially with mp4 (usually because of the PAR).
Naturally you will get much better results encoding from uncompressed AVI, but there are file size considerations (a 75 second full HD uncompressed video can be as big as 15GB).
Alex
@Sam,
The default slide size is 720x540 (4:3) but you can change that to any size you like. Just got to Design > Story Size and set a new size. Best to size your project before importing graphics, videos and so on.
You don't need to resize your videos before importing into Storyline. Storyline will auto-resize videos (larger than slide size) to fit in the slide. If the aspect ratio of your slide and imported videos are the same, the imported video will fit perfectly in your slide.
Are you looking to fill your slide with video? Or, just trying to insert a video into a slide along with other elements? That's really what will drive your optimum sizes.
So Storyline has a DAR of 4:3 which was my understanding and like Presenter, Storyline can be viewed full-screen on a display if published with that option. My take on this is to go with 720x540, and the mp4 compression should keep the bandwidth requirements reasonable.
I was unable to find any reference to altering the PAR in my video editors, so I'm not sure how that is handled or is it even preserved in a mp4 file?
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