Resolution of images in projects
Apr 27, 2012
I've been developing multimedia projects for the better part of 15 years now. Best practices in multimedia development generally dictate that images placed within projects should generally be low-resolution (72dpi). This keeps the published files size small and helps minimize the impact on bandwidth, blah, blah, blah.
PowerPoint though seems to be a unique animal and I've never quite understood how it handles images. I'm seeing techniques in a number of Articulate tutorial videos that I would never think about doing with other tools like Adobe Director, Flash and Flex - such as scaling images and doing a lot of image manipulation.
I understand PowerPoint has a lot of these features built in, but for the best possible performance, do the "old" rules apply about wanting to optimize images as much as possible when creating a PPT/Articulate project or is there some voodoo magic behind the scene's that optimizes the images for you regardless of whether you use a high or low resolution image?
10 Replies
Hello,
Articulate Presenter can throttle the image quality under Articulate > Presentation Options so you can keep things bandwidth-friendly. With PowerPoint itself, I usually go to the Save As screen, then there's an Options button with an ability to compress images down to 72 dpi. I think doing that also permanently changes images you've cropped or re-sized though...
Now that I've done a bit more poking around, what about images for Quizmaker and Engage? Would images placed in Quizmaker or Engage interactions be subject to the settings in Articulate?
What I'm trying to decide here is if we can just let folks on our team have a free-for-all in terms of what images they use (size wise) and if we can keep things bandwidth friendly by enabling some preset values/options in our template
-or-
If we need to stick to our current process of ensuring all images are 96dpi or less BEFORE placing them in a project.
I'm hoping this convo stays in circulation for a while. This is a gray area for me so I'm looking forward to following this thread...
I too would love to hear some insight from the community on this one. I often feel like I"m being sloppy because I don't know these answers!
Hi,
I'm doing a project in Storyline on how to use a piece of software. In it i will have a total of 10 screenshots that need to be really clear so trainees can look around and see where to click before then watching a short screencast on it. the screenshots are quite text heavy and need to be really clear but 72 dpi is too fuzzy. As there are so few of these images, I'm not that bothered about the increase in bandwidth required if I use 95dpi for images but I can't see how to do it. Any ideas or is it just not possible?
Thanks
Deirdre
Hi Deirdre,
Unless there is some trick I don't know about, once an image is saved at a lower resolution there is no way to increase it. Do you have access to the software so you can take new screenshots?
Hi Natalia,
Thanks for that. What I actually want to do is change the settings in Storyline to allow higher res images so that when I insert an image (or a video), that it does not automatically convert them to lower resolution images. I understand this is a bandwith issue but if my users can't see the images or videos well enough to understand them, there's no point in me making this project at all.
Any thoughts?
Deirdre
Ah - well that's completely different. I didn't realize SL compressed images to that resolution. Have you tried posting in the Storyline support section of the forum? You may find more responses on settings in that section
Hi Natalia,
just in case you'd like to know - you can change the default resolution settings in images and video. How to do it is outlined in Step 4 of this tutorial that Brian Allen directed me to:
http://community.articulate.com/tutorials/products/publishing-a-project-for-web.aspx
Enjoy!
D
Excellent! Thanks, Deirdre. I will need that for sure.
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