Video Compression

Dec 07, 2017

I am developing a Storyline course with about 25 short video clips, totaling about 37 minutes of total video. In order for Storyline to be able to handle that much video, should I be overly concerned with video compression before I bring the clips into Storyline? I want to preserve decent video quality, but I don't want to "crash" Storyline because the combined file size of the videos is too large. Does anyone have experience with something like this?

7 Replies
Doug Thompson

Nicole,

I simply ended up importing all the videos directly into Storyline. It didn't seem there was another option. It seemed to work okay, although the Storyline file ended up being about 560 MB. It would be nice if Storyline would simply "call" the videos rather than actually importing them into the file (similar to how Adobe Premiere functions.) It also made saving the file a very slow process. But in the end, it did seem to work okay. 

Todd Haynes

I think hosting the videos on a good streaming system (Vimeo, Akamai), with a content delivery network (CDN) is a good option. When embedding videos, I always run the videos through software called Handbrake, reducing the resolution to the lowest possible, and using standard codecs such as H.264, AAC audio, a saving as .mp4 format. Most of the time I also develop a "low bandwidth" option, with static screen shot(s) of the video, with text to display any dialog. The extra time is worth it for me because we have slow bandwidth across a large part of our audience and the low bandwidth option inevitably, for whatever reason, some users can't play the videos.

Michael Anderson

I have a Vimeo demo file (Storyline 2) on my website here: http://www.andersonelearning.com/Demos/index.html  The same thing can be done in Storyline 3. Streamed videos have the extra challenge of needing to use javascript to detect the end of the video, etc, but once that's figured out as shown in my demo, it's well worth embedding this way.

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