SL2 | Screen Recording Loses Quality in SL

Hi Alexander,

It sounds like you've run into a situation where both the resolution used for your screen recordings, and Storyline's compression of videos during publish are having an impact on video quality. 

For high-content screen recordings, our recommendation is to:

1. Determine, based on your audience, the average/target screen resolution of your learners.
2. Set your Story Size to something slightly less than that, to allow for browser toolbars, status bars, and so on.
3. Set the Player Size to Lock player at optimal size to prevent scaling
4. Perform Screen recording on a machine whose screen resolution is set to something slightly less than the Story Size selected above, to allow for the Storyline Player.

For example, if I needed to show screens containing lots of content at high resolution, and I knew that my learners would be using a Screen Resolution of 1920x1080, I might do the following:

• Set my Story Size to 1600 x 900
• Disable scaling
• Set my Screen Resolution to 1366 x 768 before recording.

It's possible that the target audience is using a screen resolution so low that it is not practical to perform screen recording at a significantly lower resolution, or that it's unknown. However, with very busy screencasts, the goals should be to:

1. Avoid performing screen recording at a resolution that is significantly higher than that of your learners or your story size
2. Avoid scaling screencasts to something other than their recorded size.

There are also some meaty discussions on Story Size, Screen Resolution, and Screen Recording within the E-Learning Heroes Community Forums, which I've linked to below. If following the guidance above doesn't improve the quality, you may want to check out these discussions for some more ideas:

• Here’s a Simple Screencasting Tip That Will Save Time & Frustration
• Which size screen do you design for?
• Screen Recording Larger subjects
• What's your Story Size?
• Increasing quality of screen recording

Hey Alexander,

Two thoughts.

1. If you can export your video from the iSpring tool directly to .mp4, then you could bring it into Storyline and instruct Storyline not to compress it.

2, The reason YouTube is playing the video at 480p is because your recording size height is 698p which is short of the necessary 720. Thus, YouTube plays it at 480. If you re-record at a size that hits that 720 (or higher) mark, then YouTube would push it out at 720p. 

I hope this helps!

Mike

Thank you Mika and Trina.

Problem solved! I changed the size of the course up to 1920x1080 and it worked! 

Great to be part of this community! 

Hey Alexander, 

Future reference, when you import an .mp4 into Storyline you can select no compression in the video settings area:

I'm glad that you got your project to work!  It's great to have you be a part of this community!

Mike

Awesome news, Alexander! Glad Mike and I were able to lend a hand.