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
Hi Lou! Have you thought about hosting your videos outside of the course and embedding them, rather than adding video files?
Storyline gives you the choice of video compression, but how well Storyline handles that media in the authoring stage may depend on your processing power and media setup on your machine.
Hi Louis,
How do you go with your video heavy course? I'm creating a course with short video on almost every page. Any feedback or 'heads up" based on your experience?
Sincere thanks and well wishes,
Nicole
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.
You can also upload the videos to a service like Vimeo, and then embed the Vimeo videos into your course. This keeps your course size very small and takes the load off of your LMS.
Michael,
That is good to know. I will try that next time. If you have a sample course you can post without much effort, that would be helpful to see. But don't go to any trouble.
Louis
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.
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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