Video quality in Storyline

Hi there,

I'm wondering if anyone has experience in using lots of video in their Storyline courses. I currently have a project that uses interactive video (video pauses at certain points, asking the user a question, which then prompts a small video response to pop up). Because of the nature of the interactivity, I had to split the videos up: there are 26 total in the project, directly embedded into screens.

Storyline 1 automatically compresses video to a poor quality when the course is published, so I have been replacing these compressed video files in the content folder with the original, higher-quality files to "trick" Storyline into using my own versions. It has worked well in the past, but it is not working so well with this many videos. The course runs very slowly; there is often a 10-second delay before loading a page. At times the video playback lags and freezes.

So it seems that I have to choose between quality and performance--I can either have high-quality videos that cause the course to lag and freeze, or I can use low-quality (and much less professional) videos in order for the course to perform better (though still not perfectly--there is still a lag, because there are 26 videos).

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to resolve this? What would you do?

Thanks for your help.

A.