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
Carl Beyboer

Same issue - 25 min screen capture course that I am publishing to video and so far, 4+ hours and its not finished encoding yet.  This on a new 64Gb Ram 3900 Ryzen AMD.  So its not the PC, its the encoding process in Storyline.  Currently I am about to give up... run the course and screen capture it using Camtasia.  That will only take me 30 mins. 

Looking at the resource monitor - most of the CPU cores are idle, the ones doing things are running at <20%.  Read/writing to M2 raided drives - that's not the bottleneck - can encode in Adobe a 4K animation with particles in less time!

Insane Articulate!  Remove the feature or fix it so it works in a timely manner!

Carl Beyboer

Thanks Leslie, I'm not permitted to share the file but can report that this happens across 5 separate machines with different hardware configs - its not the machine or the install.  Looking at this thread I am also thinking its Storyline's encoding engine - its just not up to it.  Support's suggestion of "clean install" or "compression settings" seems like a standard response and obviously hasn't worked in previous cases in this thread - and it doesnt work here either.

This project consists of many  many slides with snippits of a larger software demo/screen captures, so, not a simple "slide only" project.  Un-encoding and re-encoding must be happening like crazy.  However, our work machines are media production machines, set up for Adobe Premiere/After Effects and Encoding - they are fast machines and the export video function in Storyline brings all 5 to their knees.

The solution for us - dont use it.  Use Camtasia and capture the project from the screen.  Takes 30 mins on a 20 min project...

Carl Beyboer

Just a quick update to those trying this export method.  The latest patch does seem to "improve" things but... imho, still not useable:

I finally, successfully exported a video file - it still took an amazing 6 hours to publish the 20min course of screen demos on max quality settings.

Aside from making this video export function much faster to make it practical to use, my other suggestion is you need to be able to publish in the courses running order, not the order the scenes were created.  Example:

 The course I have has 8 scenes and a quiz.  The First 2 scenes were created, then the final quiz scene, then the later scenes  which were "help" demos, and only then were the core scenes created.  Articulate numbers the scenes as created so I have:

Scene 1, 2, 3 Quiz, 4+5 help scenes that go at the end 6, 7, 8 core content.  But the running order by "next button" progression is:

1,2,6,7,8,4,5,3!

 And when you export to video by "next button selection" you get a video totally out of order to the progression of the actual course, it's following the scene creation order.

 So Articulate needs to not only follow the next button action of the slides themselves - it needs to follow that action to the next scene that the next button takes you too.  As it is, the video export is completely out of whack.

 Anyway, at a core level the export does work - but is still way too slow to be useful and the ordering further compounds this.

Janet Pellizze MSN, RN, NPD-BC

Hello team,

My video is loading very slowly.  I haven't run into this with other videos, so this seems odd.  I tried the repair fix listed above - uninstalled and reinstalled Storyline.  But, that really didn't help.

The video has also been published with the audio being duplicated in some spots.  There aren't extra tracks, the problem doesn't appear in the preview or the scorm file.  Just the video.

Can you help?

Joe Dey

A year after this thread was started it seems this issue is still here.  I have a 20 second project to publish to video and whilst I have been trying for a few days now, it just will not publish, in fact this happens on any project I try to publish to video.  It behaves in exactly the same way as those reports of a year ago.  I give up after a couple of hours.  Its easier to pay for Parallels ToolBox and use its screen recorder.  It creates Chrystal clear recordings in seconds.  Replay does a similar trick but its output is very low quality.  

Jim Powell

 This has been a proven shortcoming of this software for years. It's crippling. Has anyone NOT encountered this? I'd be happy to be proven wrong. It's ANYONE, ANYWHERE able to quickly publish a video from storyline?

Endless messages saying "send me your file..."

Don't make any sense to me. This isn't a bug. It's the way the software works which is to say it doesn't.

Hope springs eternal so I monitor this thread.  I've spent the of thousands of dollars for the fastest 64 bit computers I can get but... Terabytes of NvMe storage... 128 Gb of ram.... external protestors.

Nothing works.

Has anything changed?

Becca Levan

Hi Jim,

Thank you for following up here, and I’m so sorry that you’ve been facing this frustration for some time now. 

Numerous factors are involved when publishing to video, which can cause a challenge to pinpoint slowness. I’ve looked at the case history for others in this thread, and I don’t see a standard solution; instead, it varies case by case.

From here, I’d encourage you to work 1:1 with one of our support engineers, so they can gather details about your project and help determine what is causing the issue for you specifically. I’ve opened a case on your behalf, and one of my teammates will reach out to you directly soon.

Carl Beyboer

"Has anyone NOT encountered this? I'd be happy to be proven wrong. It's ANYONE, ANYWHERE able to quickly publish a video from storyline?

Endless messages saying "send me your file..."

yup, total waste of time.  I recently tried again (on yet another PC) a very simple project export and it took hours and crashed the first time. Dont waste any more time trouble shooting and simply screen capture it with different software.

Dayn Wilkins

I think most people will find publishing slow. I have the same problem and was in contact with support a while back. Apparently, this is largely because Storyline is a 32 bit application which can access less RAM for video encoding than a 64 bit application, leading to bottlenecks. As I understand it there are no plans for a 64 Bit version of Storyline.

Articulate - could we have a separate 64Bit utility that would take a .story file and publish it in video format? A bit like the video encoder that used to be (or still is?) part of Studio?

We produce a lot of step mode screen recordings for our clients and we often need to publish in video format. But the publishing speed is just snail pace compared with Camtasia. 

Alex del Solar

I had the same issue pubishing to video...

BUT I FOUND THE SOURCE OF THE ISSUE

In my case, publishing took a lot when I inserted a video taken from the Video Library. After removing that video from 2 layers, now the publishing goes fast.

I tried setting the video compression to None and Auto, reducing quality... but nothing... only when I removed the video, the publishing worked without issues.

Kelly Auner

Hi Administrador WelcomeNext,

I'm sorry to hear that you were experiencing this issue with slow publishing. Thank you for updating this thread with what worked for you!

If you'd like us to take a look at your project, please share it here or privately through a support case. We'll be happy to investigate this further!

Alex del Solar

Hi Kelly,

I already sent you a support case, attaching a sample Storyline project, so you can check the issue by yourselves.

The issue was sent from the same e-mail we are using on this forum.

In my report, you will see instructions on how to test the file and how to reproduce the issue.

Regards!

John Morgan

Hi Luke,

Welcome to E-Learning Heroes! I understand Storyline is crashing when you are trying to export a video. I’m happy to work with you to figure out why this is happening! I have a few follow-up questions regarding the situation so I can understand what you are experiencing a little better.

  • Is this happening with more than one file or is this the only one?
  • Are you working from a shared drive? If so, I recommend saving your files on your local drive before creating, editing, and publishing them. This will help minimize any unexpected behavior.
  • Are the videos imported from a file or screen recordings?
  • Are you receiving an error message when Storyline crashes? If so, it'd be helpful if you could provide a screenshot or details of what it says.

Thanks for reaching out and I look forward to your response!