Screen recording video is blurry in Storyline

Jan 24, 2013

Hi,

I was hoping that a hero would come to my rescue

I am trying to figure out why do my screen recording videos come off as blurry.

I made sure that the video is scaled to 100%, and that my story & player sizes are small enough to fit in browser without shrinking. But still. Blurry.

Any ideas what am I doing wrong?

Thanks, Tali

24 Replies
Tali Bromberg

Hi Phil,

No, the video's resolution is smaller than that of the slide:

My story size is: 1240x738,

and my video size is: 1040x544.

Maybe this might give a clue: I noticed that even before inserting the video into the story, in that middle-stage where you choose whether to insert as a single video or as step-by-step, if I press right-click and export the video as mp4 and than open the movie in say media player - it's also blurry. So maybe something is wrong with the actual recording? I don't know if that's relevant. Just spitballing here...

Lisa Struebing

I have experienced the same thing.  Even when recording at the same size as my SL project, it looks great in video editor tool, but when I import it into SL, it's blurry.   Something to note.  It doesn't seem to matter if I record it via SL or my external video editor...still shows up blurry and not crisp like I see it on the monitor during record.

This is a media that I use very frequently.  It would be great to have some answers on how to correct blurry videos in SL.

Thanks.....Lisa

Jacinta Penn

I have also experienced this problem and still do, so also keen for answer.   However I will recommend optimising your video quality, which helped a little. When you go into publish, click on Quality: Custom Optimisation and then incrase the video quality.  

Again, this will not wholly solve the problem, I think Storyline might be reducing the video somehow, but at least you get the best of what you do get.

James Rigdon

I tried it the way Deepak Kumar suggested above, and I'm still not pleased with the quality.

Any additional suggestions would be great.

Deepak Kumar said:

Here are the steps to get the better quality of video


 1.       Record your screens and insert it as step-by-step slides on view mode steps.

2.       Rights click on slide and select action fine tuning option

3.       Capture Action Fine Tuning box will appear.

4.       Then select “Export movie”

5.       Insert this movie in your project.

Julie Rodgers

I experienced this same issue yet none of the posted solutions were right for me, so I came up with an alternative solution. I have not seen anyone else post this idea, so thought I'd post it in case it helps someone else in the future.

I took my existing screencast recordings and added Zoom Regions. When I published, the Zoom Regions were crystal clear! I added one Zoom Region after another so the entire screencast was clear. Hope it helps!

Leigh S

Julie - I was just having issues with this as well, and the zoom area trick worked! I didn't even have to zoom in all that much for the image quality to improve. Thanks for posting!

Julie Rodgers said:

I experienced this same issue yet none of the posted solutions were right for me, so I came up with an alternative solution. I have not seen anyone else post this idea, so thought I'd post it in case it helps someone else in the future.

I took my existing screencast recordings and added Zoom Regions. When I published, the Zoom Regions were crystal clear! I added one Zoom Region after another so the entire screencast was clear. Hope it helps!

Jonathon Miller

I am assuming this is happening when you are recording a screencast within Storyline. I would really love to see a technical explanation of what is happening and why this zoom area trick is working.

Has anyone had any resolution issues with actual video they have taken, such as producing a short film losing quality when it placed in a Storyline project?

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Jonathon,

I wanted to pop in regarding your question about video quality. Does the quality change once it's inserted into Storyline or upon publish? There is a certain amount of video compression that occurs when publishing Storyline with videos included, and as I mentioned above you can change the publish quality settings. You could also replace the video in the published output with the original as Mike Enders describes here:

Chris Miocic

Hello everyone, I am having the same issue with the screen capture being blurry when publishing. I can't seem to get the same crispness that I was able to achieve with Captivate screen recordings. Has anyone found a way to capture the screens so they are clear and crisp without having to do the workarounds listed above? If so, I would love to hear what settings you used and how you were able to accomplish. Thank you, appreciate any assistance you can provide.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Annelize, 

Storyline will conduct a certain amount of compression as a part of the publishing process, but the final size is dependent on your initial video and what you choose as a part of the publish quality settings (discussed here in Step 4).  

You could also look at zipping the final published output which will make it smaller in terms of emailing. 

Jason Livesey

I dunno if this directly relates to the original question asked, but I also had an issue with blurry video after publishing my story line even though the videos looked great in Articulate. Here is what I found.

The quality of your video directly depends on the size of your slides, also known as the "Story Size". If you have slides that are smaller then the dimensions of your video it will become squashed and blurry when you publish. Even though it looks fine while you are building the project. If you are able to increase the size of the slides this should fix the issue.

We were not able to do this as we had many markers thought the many story lines we just created that we would have had to go through and reposition. So our work around was to have the video open in browser and not in the slide when you click the video. However the video still sat in the slide looking gross.

As far as I can tell you cannot use a marker to make a play button that opens the video in the browser. They only work for videos that play in the slide. So our compromise was to right click the video and set a poster frame that was an image of a play button. We had videos if varying dimensions, but since the video is not playing in the slide we changed the dimensions of the in slide video to match the play button image. Changing these does not have any effect on the video that opens in the browser once the user clicks. The only downside is that the play button gets a bit grainy like the video preview. But this is much less noticeable.

On a side note, when working with a poster frame in a published story line i kept seeing an issue where the "play button" would disappear when the slide was kept open for the duration of the video. We got around this by extending the timeline of that slide and then dragging the video layer out to the new duration. My best guess is that this is caused by a coding conflict where the time line and the video end at the same moment. Cause once I added just an extra second of duration to the timeline of the slide the key frame would no longer vanish.

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