video compression in story line

Feb 15, 2013

Hi

I wonder to know how the video is encoded in story line for MP4

When adjusting the video quality in story line from lower rate to higher quality (5),

how vary the following parameters:

n : gap between intra image
and m parameters gap between bidirectionnal image

cbr (constant bit rate) or vbr (variable bit rate)

number of pass: 1 or 2 ?

And I have a second question:  MP4 video is imported  in storyline

What is your recommmendation about the imported MP4

60 image/sec or 50 image/sec

interlaced or Progressive
Size in term of pixels or lines

Is it better to import the highest quality and let the storyline encoder makes the job to reduce quality and rate

or do you recommend an average flow rate.

Thank you in advance and best regards

François

8 Replies
Glen Perry

I seem to be having a different problem myself and have yet to find a way around it.

No matter what file size or bitrate we set the original Mp4 or uncompressed Avi at the compression is entirely to dramatic and is severely affecting the quality of the video.  this is something I have never seen before in any sort of progressive compression.  Even if the compression is set at 9 (least compression) all of the videos are compressed down to around the same size, no matter what the original started out as.

Examples are with the same video file rendered from Sony Vegas at different bitrate then imported and published out of Storyline:

As a designer I render my videos and/or animations to work at the bandwidth and quality suited for our needs.  There should be some option in Storyline to stop it from compressing the videos.  I think it is great that it has great compression but the compression is to great for some of us that has to have more quality.  For our application we should be near 800Kbps and I have yet been able to accomplish that.

So is there any way around this ? 

Peter Anderson

Hey Glen!

First, I completely understand where you're coming from and I'm sorry for the inconvenience. But right now, Storyline puts an emphasis on making the videos small and efficient for low bandwidth environments. If you're interested in super-high quality videos which may cause issues with low-bandwidth, I'd recommend submitting a feature request to give yourself that option. I think it's a good one.

An unsupported option, and I've seen this work with mixed results, would be to replace the videos in the published output with your higher-quality versions and our file names. But please keep in mind though, that's not something that is supported in any way by Articulate. 

Thanks for your input, Glen, and best of luck with the project!

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