Publish to Video is Slow

Mar 10, 2020

Hi,

I am trying to publish an 8 min Articulate Storyline 360 video and it is taking over an hour.  Is there any way to speed up publishing of these videos?

Pinned Reply
Steven Benassi

Hi Everyone!

Great news! I'm happy to share that we just released Storyline 360 (version 3.82.31354.0), which includes a new 64-bit version of Storyline 360! Harness the processing power in modern computers with 64-bit Storyline 360. Large, media-rich courses benefit from increased stability and faster performance!

To use 64-bit Storyline 360, please update your Articulate 360 desktop app, then click the Install button next to the Storyline 360 app with the 64-bit and beta labels. The Install button will change to an Open button when the installation is complete.

This was highly requested, so we hope it serves you in your course creation! If you run into any snags, don't hesitate to contact our team in a support case.

80 Replies
Dayn Wilkins

Hi guys

This is an incredibly useful feature of Storyline, let down by its publishing speed.

I appreciate that rebuilding Storyline as a 64-bit application would probably be an enormous task, but how about creating a separate 64-bit utility in the 360 suite that could open a Storyline file and publish it as video?

Jessica Houde

Hey Friends,

I too am experiencing severely slow publishing times when attempting to publish a video.  Recently ,it has been over an hour every time and some of them upwards to a few hours.  Has there been any progress on correcting this problem?  I would really hate to have to veer from using Storyline because I love it! Unfortunately, the extended time spent on publishing is really putting a damper on my deadlines .  Open to any other suggestions as well!  :)

Katie Riggio

Hi Jessica,

Thanks for writing in. We're happy to look into the publishing process and appreciate you opening a support case!

Be sure to let us know if you have any more questions about Renato's findings!

✎ Note: Publishing videos, especially high-quality videos, can take some time. The maximum duration for a published video is two hours, and the published frame rate is 30 fps.

Storyline 360: Publishing a Course to a Video File
Katie Riggio

Hi there, James! 

I'm sorry to hear that, and I'd love to look into the process with you.

First, we have these best practices for preparing content for video publishing

Next Step: Are you comfortable with sharing the course file? It'll help us review the publish time, and we'll delete it from our machines after. 

Michele Micha

Hi, to follow up on my experience... I sent the file to Articulate and it took them the same amount of time it took me to publish a file. A 2 minute video took about 20 minutes to publish. For me, a 5 minute video was taking over an hour. And I had 10 videos, all about 5 minutes - each of which took over an hour. I would like to continue using Storyline for remaining videos (about 20 of them) for this client but, unfortunately, am hesitant to do so because of the publishing speed, or lack thereof. 

Should I upload one of the 5 minute videos that are taking over an hour to publish so you can review it as there may be a different reason? 

Thank you! 

Michele

 

Jeremy Dittmer

I am also encountering this problem. Publishing to video is excruciatingly slow with the latest version of SL360 (3.47.23871) on a very fast Windows 10 PC. However if I publish using the older version (3.36.21289) that is running on my slower Windows 8.1 PC, there is no issue!

I have looked at what is going on behind the scenes using Microsoft's Resource Monitor and it suggests that there are two background process that actually do the donkey work called Articulate.PublishToMp4.exe and encoder.exe. Tellingly when I publish with v3.36, the CPU usage of these processes are around 5% and 25% respectively. However with v3.47 the figures are 3% and 4%. Now whilst this is on a faster PC it strongly suggests to me that encoder.exe is not working properly and that this is the source of the problem.

Unfortunately this issue does not just affect pure video publishing but also standard HTML5 publishing for projects that include video, which for me at least, means pretty much all projects. So I do hope the problem is addressed ASAP.

Jeremy Dittmer

Further to my earlier comment I have tried replacing the v3.47.23871 Articulate.PublishToMp4.exe with the v3.36.21289 version. A sample MP4 publish took a few seconds with the older file and several minutes with the new version. Replacing encoder.exe made no discernible difference. So it would seem that the problem lies with the new version of Articulate.PublishToMp4.exe.

Katie Riggio

Hi, Jeremy!

I appreciate you sharing your findings with us! I'll surface that to my team, and we'll notify you as soon as we have any more details to share. 

As always, we're happy to connect with you directly and troubleshoot further. Simply use this link to open a case, where our Engineers will share the next step.

Martin Maynard

Hey all, late to the game here, but I (and my teammates) have been experiencing this as well. It seems a little funny that "everyone" is having the same issues, and it's not getting resolved, and I don't think that anything in any of our files is causing the problem since we all have the same problem and we certainly cannot all have the same elements in our files. I have only started noticing this issue in the last 6 months. And it's super frustrating. 

I have found a fix though. We stopped using Articulate. Video production is much faster. Not the most ideal, but we can record, edit, and publish videos in the time it takes one small Storyline file to publish.

Kris Grant

Morning we have a major project with an NHS Trust and need to publish video of the eLearning for new staff who do not have access to our systems. However, we are having the same issues as the others above where the encoding video at medium quality was taking all day. We have tried on different devices and the result is the same - would we be able to provide you with the project to assist please?

Have raised a case with Support.

       

Maria Costa-Stienstra

Hi, Kris, and welcome to E-Learning Heroes! ✨

Thank you for opening a support case with our engineers. I see you worked with my teammate Lejan, who suggested splitting the project into smaller chunks for faster encoding.

If you have additional questions, please reach out to Lejan through the case.

dan saunderson

I think it is. I'm only running an 8700k (its OC's to 5.1ghz) 32gig 3200 ram and a 2080ti, and articulate just takes forever to encode anything. I sent a project I was working on to my buddy who has a 32 core threadripper to see if it was faster, and sadly it wasn't. None of my cores are being slammed like they would be in premier (without using the tensor cores from an rtx gpu). I think at somepoint they just need to update and optimize articulate to take advantage of more cores and gpu processing power.