Video quality
Mar 07, 2013
Hi community
I have a question regarding video quality. I am working on a case where I have been filming several scenarios with actors. The recording equipment involved is a panasonic ag-hpx250j P2 camera which is very good. I have been taking these shots in full HD 1080i
After editing them in Avid composer they have been exported in full HD to Quicktmie. Then compressed with Sorenson Squeese with the 1080 youtube HD setting.
The films look very nice when I watch them with VLC. When I insert them into my project in Articulate Storyline and publish them, they dont looks so good anymore.
All the publish settings for video and sound are maxed out in Storyline. Take a look here
Medical Ethics e-learning project
How can I get better looking videos in Storyline?
55 Replies
Oh and by the way, for non-video people like me the following video compression settings might be helpful. This is for Storyline on iPad with the story size of 720x460 and works beautifully (videos are slightly letterboxed). This seems to be a good compromise between huge file size and good quality. 2-5 min videos end up around 8-15MB. Bigger than what Storyline compresses them to but generally still workable.
Unfortunately when I tried this I got a video full of bright dayglo green pixilation jumping around the place, so gave up immediately and went for another solution...
May try again with next project and see if I get any joy.
Bruce
Leslie,
Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to ID the videos outside of clicking and viewing. If I find out differently, I'll let you know!
Mike
OK - tried this again today and worked perfectly.
Thanks - and certainly a solution for shorter video content.
Thoughts:
1> As per Leslie - better video identification would be great. Inserting the slide identifier at the start would be a great help.
2> SL should have a "Do not compress my video" option. I am amazed now that I have got it to work at just how much of my quality I lost even at the highest setting. I appreciate (in this instance) it's only a 22 second video and does not affect the .story file size much, but I would love it is that were my default call to make.
Bruce
Thanks everyone for comments on this. Agree with Bruce on a lot of this; we have partners whose first projects looked great on Presenter, but now every time we send a published project, the response is, "What happened to the great-quality video we sent you? What's this?"
Will give some of the above a try. (The ones I understood
Best
Hi Articulate...
I am finding that after following Mike's instructions this no longer works for me.
All it does is play, but no (new) video shows at all.
Is there anywhere I can go here - as I NEED 100% quality video inserted. Would appreciate your help.
Thanks
Bruce
Please ignore my last post - I still had it in .mov format and not .mp4
All OK again.
Thanks Nancy!
Anyone considered running the video's from website, leaving the quality intact. You can place them inside your LMS, CMS or on vimeo or youtube.or embed them as webobjects which places the video uncompressed I believe inside your published folder group.
Hi, i've done the replacement of the videos with my own quality videosand in the ipad works fine but now in the flash version when you press a button the next slide tooks so long to load. Is like the buffering of the video has pririty over the loading. any way to solve this.
Thanks
That is really down to the server speed, keep in mind it, that when inside an LMS it will take longer the first time you play the video as the LMS needs to place the video inside the Cache.
It is not due to Storyline as I believe no matter what format you use to place it in, storyline will compress it all the same (except for flv) unless you use webojects, external website or you could cut the video up in smaller sections and play next when media ends.(speeding up load times)
Regards
Byron
Thank you all for the feedback. The solution for me is to swap out the videos in the story_content folder with a better copy.
When I export my videos from Premiere pro CS 6 I now use the 720 25fps preset for Ipad, Iphone. To sum it up:
1280*720, 25 fps, progressive, VBR 2 pass
Target bitrate: 2,2
Max bitrate: 2,64
Key frame 75
Audio
AAC, 160 kbps, 48hz, Stereo
This seem to work for my project for now.
Here is a test
http://www.med-utv.uio.no/jbgtest/elaring/testmorten/quality/
Thanks for this - my issue is that this cannot be done when publishing to articulate online... how do you get round the issue when you publish directly to articulate online
Thanks for this - my issue is that this cannot be done when publishing to articulate online... how do you get round the issue when you publish directly to articulate online
I have also encountered the quality problem with storyline outputs.
H264 encoding doesn't always have to look bad!
Higher quality settings or the ability to import h264 files without recompression is my number one request.
This is a great workaround. Agree with all the above comments that this needs to be addressed in development.
I haven't looked into this issue for some time. I'm glad I decided to see if anyone had a workaround! I'm looking forward to trying this. I'll also throw my support behind the option to keep video files at their original quality.
this is another workaround
You could link the video in resources
and then call the resource from a trigger, without the resource being compressed
1http://www.articulate.com/support/storyline/how-to-link-to-a-file-resource-attachment
or embed as a webobject, this will also bypass storyline's compression
http://community.articulate.com/tutorials/products/adding-web-objects.aspx
please keep in mind that the publish has to be on a server (not your local drive or external harddrive) for you to be able to test the result of a webobject or url.
regards
Byron
We are having some issues with video quality as well. Initially our team did some filming off a video camera that was saved in the incorrect file format - for which we have obtained the correct one. In the interim we started filming directly off the webcam on the laptop directly into Articulate. The quality of the video actually looks fine when published and viewing within articulate itself, but once it is uploaded into our LMS it deteriorates considerably with eyes and faces slow and distorted.
Are you able to shed any light on why this happens and what we might be able to do about it?
My all time favorite trick for getting the best video resolution in Storyline is to encode with Adobe Media Encoder and check the box for "encode alpha channel" Even if I don't need an alpha channel (chroma key or transparent background). SL will not re-encode video that has an alpha channel.
My next favorite trick for great video quality when I am using a transparent background (like when an on line coach walks into the slide and begins talking), is to create a video with dimensions just big enough to cove your subject. since the background is clear you don't need your video to be wide as 1280 or 1920 just a third of that is needed to cover you talent's width. Then your video is small and you can increase the quality with and still have a small bandwidth. I use Premiere and create a new sequence with the tall and skinny dimensions then drag my HD video on to the sequence timeline. This may sound a bit complicated. I realize now I should create a little screenr to explain. Coming soon to this thread.
Thanks,
Tim
Is there a reason why this wouldn't work when published as an LMS? I have a file that has 10 MP4 files. When I swapped the compressed files with the original files and renamed with the compressed name, it won't load to our LMS. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Jessica
Hi Jessica -
What LMS are you using? Was there an error message?
Make sure that when zipping, you're zipping the contents of the folder not the folder itself. The imsmanifest.xml file MUST be at the root of the zip file. If this isn't the problem, the re-zip could have added stuff that the LMS doesn't like. I've seen this with one LMS (Don't remember which). I zipped the SCO on a Mac and the mac files were rejected by the LMS. You might try another zipping method to see if that does the trick.
Hi Tim
Great trick thanks
Does working with Alpha channels work for you? (when you actually need the alpha channel, that is)
Also does it work when you are running the HTML version?
I found the alpha channel videos create an issue in HTML5.
It would be great if alpha channels would work, so we could use some of the avatars with alpha channels.
Cheers
Hi there,
Thanks for the work around - very helpful indeed!
I hope the dev team does action the no compression feature though, as this would really help!
Thanks for the great work
Cheers,
Rudy
Hi all!
I had a question about the swap in a published project between the compressed MP4 with a higher quality MP4. Obviously, the higher quality MP4 will take longer to load, however, after swapping out the files, the course stalls with the spinning wheel instead of progressively loading while the video is playing.
Is there any way to maintain the progressive loading process after swapping out the MP4 file?
Has there been any updates to SL lately that fixes this issue?
Well a good link you shared here. I think you should go to youtube I have found lots of good videos there.
This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.