Does anyone have any experience with this? In the past I've just imported a GIF sequence and used that for animation, however I'm losing a lot of the quality in the image that I'm trying to import.
I've tried having each frame as a separate state and triggering it, along with having each image still as a separate element on the time line. However it's still not as clean as I'd like. Any thoughts? If not I'm going to submit it as a feature request and hope for the best!
Gif sequences are really great because they support what amounts to video in an image format. But, they are limited to, at most, 256 colors. While that's OK for some things, in many cases it causes you to loose resolution, as you have noticed.
PNGs have no animation or video support at all. A PNG sequence is just a sequence of PNG files numbered by the frame number of the animation. You can place these in Storyline, and do a simple animation, but your frame rate will be limited to 4 frames per second. That's a really slow frame rate. Most video files that we are used to are around 40 frames per second. So at 4 frames per second, the animation is kind of stop-and-go. Again, that may be OK for some things.
So for most presentations, what you are really looking for is true video. I like to use .mp4, but any format that Storyline supports, including .wmv will work. Storyline will re-encode whatever you import to work properly when published.
Any videos imported into storyline, are imported into a player, complete with video controls that the user can access. In most of the training that I create, we don't want our audience to have that ability. I can prevent users from accessing the video controls by placing a transparent shape above the video. That prevents users from clicking on the video, and it plays along with the timeline. If you have any interactions that you want timed to the video, keep your clips short, and place your interactions before or after the video clip. You can use a still frame from the video as an image when you want to keep a frame on screen during the interaction. I also like to place only one video clip on the timeline. Place additional clips on new slides, or on a new layer. This allows you to retain control of when the different clips play.
I'm not sure what development tools that you use for your images and videos, but pretty much anything that you are familiar with will work.
Not exactly what you're looking for but I've used PNG image sequences in Storyline and have accessed them using states and sliders, see this post for more info: http://www.4-pt.co.uk/3d-rotation-storyline-2/
The principle would be the same if you were to use triggers to alter the state of an image. The key is to have enough states to keep the animation smooth.
I am always opting for importing already produced GIF. Which software do you use for making GIFs? Adobe Premiere pro CC can produce with high-quality. After that import to Storyline...and I have no loss of quality.
9 Replies
Hi Darren, no suggestions but have had the same quality issues and am interested in any ideas.
thanks Christine
Hi Darren and Christine,
Gif sequences are really great because they support what amounts to video in an image format. But, they are limited to, at most, 256 colors. While that's OK for some things, in many cases it causes you to loose resolution, as you have noticed.
PNGs have no animation or video support at all. A PNG sequence is just a sequence of PNG files numbered by the frame number of the animation. You can place these in Storyline, and do a simple animation, but your frame rate will be limited to 4 frames per second. That's a really slow frame rate. Most video files that we are used to are around 40 frames per second. So at 4 frames per second, the animation is kind of stop-and-go. Again, that may be OK for some things.
So for most presentations, what you are really looking for is true video. I like to use .mp4, but any format that Storyline supports, including .wmv will work. Storyline will re-encode whatever you import to work properly when published.
Any videos imported into storyline, are imported into a player, complete with video controls that the user can access. In most of the training that I create, we don't want our audience to have that ability. I can prevent users from accessing the video controls by placing a transparent shape above the video. That prevents users from clicking on the video, and it plays along with the timeline. If you have any interactions that you want timed to the video, keep your clips short, and place your interactions before or after the video clip. You can use a still frame from the video as an image when you want to keep a frame on screen during the interaction. I also like to place only one video clip on the timeline. Place additional clips on new slides, or on a new layer. This allows you to retain control of when the different clips play.
I'm not sure what development tools that you use for your images and videos, but pretty much anything that you are familiar with will work.
Hi Darren,
Not exactly what you're looking for but I've used PNG image sequences in Storyline and have accessed them using states and sliders, see this post for more info: http://www.4-pt.co.uk/3d-rotation-storyline-2/
The principle would be the same if you were to use triggers to alter the state of an image. The key is to have enough states to keep the animation smooth.
HTML5 would be the best way to do this. I am working on it now, will post when I have it done.
I am always opting for importing already produced GIF. Which software do you use for making GIFs? Adobe Premiere pro CC can produce with high-quality. After that import to Storyline...and I have no loss of quality.
Curtis...any progress on this?
I think 200 other things crept in but let me check :)
I wonder if this has been solved yet. Do you have any updates?
Hi guys,
Does Storyline not support animated PNGs (ANPG format) at all ?
I tried importing an animated PNG and storyline just treated it like a static image.
Thanks
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