Video settings

Aug 03, 2012

Can somebody tell me what settings Storyline imports a video? It looks like it reduces the video to MP4 720x405 but what are the other settings such as frame per seconds, video and audio bitrates, etc?

7 Replies
Mike Enders

Yves,

When SL first imports a video, it really doesn't do anything to it. For example, if you import a .WMV, it will say .WMV in the timeline. It's not until you publish, that SL works it's MP4 encoding magic.  And I'm not sure what those settings are.

As for video dimensions, it will resize the video dimensions to fit onto the screen.   For example, if you drop a full 1080 HD clip in a standard 720x540 canvas, it will drop it down to fit.  However, if your canvas is a full 1920x1080, it will fill it right up for you!

Mike

Yves Pelletier

It gets even more weird when I did the following test:

I started with a 11MB project before I inserted my video. The original video as I said was 145MB m4v. I converted it twice myself both times MP4 with a setting of 720x405 (which is the resulting setting after I insert the m4v video into my project. Both conversions was at 25 fps and the same audio settings but the first conversion I used 2.0 Mbit/sec and the second 1.0 Mbit/sec. The resulting sizes were 59MB and 31MB respectively. The results of my test was as follows:

1. 144Mb M4V video:  project increased from 11MB to 31Mb. An increase of approximately 20MB.

2. 59MB MP4 video. project increased from 11 MB to 33MB. An increase of approximately 22MB.

3. 31MB MP4 video. project increased from 11 MB to almost 35MB. An increase of approximately 23.5MB.

In all cases the increase is smaller than the size of the video inserted but the better the quality of the video I inserted, the smaller the resulting project size. I didn't expect that. I'd like to understand what is going on behind the scene.

Mike Enders

Yves,

Just heard back from our tech guys...

When you import video, we convert it to a high quality MP4 file. This high quality MP4 file will always stay inside your .story file. The file size of the project will increase, but due to the encoding the file size of the story file will still remain relatively small. 

This high quality file will be used when you publish your content. Instead of only keeping the published version of the file in the .story file, we always keep that high quality file. Whether you choose to publish it with a quality of 1 or 9 (via the quality option), the author doesn't have to worry about re-encoding the same file and getting terrible output over time. 

I don't have any word on bit rate, etc.

I hope this helps.

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