SL3 High Res Graphical Limitations

Hi Melissa,

We have some documented best practices here that you may have already seen and the processing power of Storyline is also going to depend on your system set up - which my guess is pretty good if you're dealing with high quality and high resolution graphics on a regular basis. 

I'd love to get one of your images into the hands of our team to play around with it and offer any other advice. Can you share with us here? 

Hi Ashley,

My set-up is beyond average. I have a brand new, top-of-the-line surface book pro, i7 designed specifically for video and multi-media work. This laptop has over 500 GB of memory, 16GB of RAM and 6600U, 2.8Ghz processor. It is a 64-bit OS with Windows 10.

We crunch a lot of video in our line of work and needed a machine that could handle it. We all work local.

As far as pictures go...it is nothing special. I am pulling regular stock images from iStock that are either medium or large in size. Picture file size of one that I just inserted was an office background and was 1 mg. I layered another picture over it which was .5 mg....and you can see the notable difference in slowness. Particularly with layering images. And on those same slides when I am editing text...its slow to switch over to the text and function with editing. If you get a 2 or 3 mg image on 1 slide...it really struggles.

The moment I hide the images...SL speeds up fine...but I have to shut it down nonetheless.

I noticed this issue in SL2 and SL3, but I don't remember it being an issue in earlier versions or Presenter.

Hi Melissa,

Does Storyline crash ever or it only becomes unbearably slow? I don't see a case under your name, but I can start one to get you working with our Support team! 

Hi Ashley,

SL has crashed before, but not often and I don't think the two are related.

I have conducted repairs, work local and have moved over files into new (uncorrupted) projects and it still seems to be a persistent issue from project-to-project and with SL1, SL2 and SL3.

The issue seems to strictly be limited to working with larger graphics on slides. And its at slowest peak with I use higher res stock image as a background and layer other stock images over it.

Hiding the graphics frees up performance. It is almost as if there is a file size limit to what SL functions well under for each slide. Knowing that information upfront would be helpful but yet I cant seem to get a recommendation to what this may be from support - only best practices on how to insert graphics.

The only resolution I have seen was for users either lower the file size and reinsert the image as a smaller file (avoiding things over 1-2 mgs), or to hunt down the offending, larger image and delete it.

At this point, it sounds more like a feature request to increase the juice with graphics.

It is interesting that Presenter does not seem to show similar behavior.

Hi Melissa, 

I haven't ever seen a file size limit for an individual image or even Storyline as a whole...so we haven't published a guideline or recommendation on that. We have some image best practices here, but it does sound like your issue is a bit outside of that.

I can start a support case for you, that way you could share one of these images and our team can give it a try as well. You'll see an email from our Support@articulate.com account with a link to upload, and then you should hear from a member of our team within a couple days.