Published Text & Images Blurry/Fuzzy

Hi there Jenny.  It is really difficult to see that image with the amount of blurriness you're getting!  HTML5 output is going to be less crisp than Flash output with Storyline 2, but let's see if we can understand what's happening to your image.

Can you share the .story file that you're working with here?  If not, you can always submit it privately to us.

Hi Crystal!  I'd be happy to share it with you privately.  In addition to the blurring, I've noticed some other unusual behaviors, as well.  I was recently troubleshooting crashing after exiting Preview and reinstalled Storyline.  However, we're still hunting for the solution on that issue. 

1.  Audio not launching consistently.  This happens on random slides and I've noticed it in all situations (first visit to slide, pause & restart, replay).

2. Screencast recordings looping when not set to do so.  I've only seen this done on slide 3.13.

3.  Animations disappearing upon replay or pause & restart.  See slide 2.4.

4.  Screencast background color darkening from white (when captured) to grey (when published).  This exists on most slides.

I think my application is possessed!  Thanks for any insights you can provide!

Hi Jennie!  Thanks for sending along your file.  I noticed some of these behaviors but not all of them in my testing environment. 

Since it's a bit inconsistent (and it also crashed for me at my first attempt at publishing), I'm going to escalate it to our support engineers for an expert opinion. 

Thank you for your help, Crystal! My leader approved an upgrade to
Storyline 3, so maybe that will solve some of the issues I'm experiencing,
too.

Jennie

Hi again.  I upgraded to SL3, and unfortunately, the image quality problem persists.  I've tried all of these suggestions, and then some.  I don't stretch my images, so I know that's not the problem.  I read here that scaling down the images can result in a loss of quality, but that means I would have to work through many more steps to appropriately scale my screen shots (which is just about every image in the course).  (I'd welcome advice on how to do this efficiently, if it's my only option!)  I've attached samples of what I'm seeing.  Any insight or help would be greatly appreciated.  I can share my project again privately, if that helps.

Additionally, the images in my screen recordings are blurry, which doesn't make sense since the recording was performed by SL using the Record Screen feature. 

My client has already commented on the lack of clarity with the images, and I'm anxious to deliver a quality product!  

Thanks!

Hi Jennie,

What's the screensize at which you're recording? Whats you're story size in the Storyline course itself? It does appear that the image is scaled down as you've inserted it inside a lightbox - so again that can cause issues with the quality as you're seeing. 

Also, how does it appear in other browsers? We've had some users indicate that Chrome doesn't provide as crisp clear output as other browsers such as Firefox, Safari and even Internet Explorer when viewing the HTML5 output. Our team is looking into what changes we can make to provide a better output from Chrome, but you may want to try a few other browsers in the meantime. 

Hi Ashley!  I sized my screen recorder to catch a segment of my application (which is in a browser), so this resulted in a custom size of 1144 x 646.  My story size is 720 x 405 (16:9), with aspect ratio locked.  I've tested the file in IE and Mozilla, and did notice that the images were better than in Chrome.

Do you think my recording screensize should match the story size?

Hi Jennie, 

If your screen recording size and your story size were closer, there would be less scaling over all and a better quality. What you may also want to look at is how large can you resize the application so that you are capturing that at a larger view while working within the story size of 720 x 405. 

Here are some other useful techniques for conducting high quality screen recordings in Storyline. 

I'm glad that IE and Firefox showed a bit clearer display, as that has matched what we've seen with some recent Chrome updates as well. We'll let you know as soon as we can about the fixes we're implementing to ensure that the Chrome output is as clear as the other browsers.

That makes sense. Thank you for all of your help!

No problem, Jennie! 😀