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
Leslie Shapiro

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.

Resolution: 720x405 (really 406 - The square numbers are required for mpeg-4 based codecs.)
Profile: Main
FPS: 30.00
Field order: None (Progressive)
Pixel aspect: 1.0 (Square)
Variable Bit rate, 2 pass
Maximum 2 Mbits / sec
Average 600 kbits / sec
 
Audio 48kHz
128 kbits / sec
Bruce Graham

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

Tamara Muroiwa

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

byron tik

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

Morten Skoglund

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/

Leigh  Martin

Mike Enders said:

Hey folks, just coming back round to this.  One solution:



Starting with a high quality MP4 source file that you've dropped into Storyline

1. Publish your project


2. Identify the compressed/published MP4 in the Story_Content folder


3. Drop your high quality source .mp4 into the Story_Content folder


4. Rename your high quality source the same as compressed/published MP4


5. Delete compressed/published MP4



https://player.vimeo.com/video/149072573



Mike




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 

Leigh  Martin

Mike Enders said:

Hey folks, just coming back round to this.  One solution:



Starting with a high quality MP4 source file that you've dropped into Storyline

1. Publish your project


2. Identify the compressed/published MP4 in the Story_Content folder


3. Drop your high quality source .mp4 into the Story_Content folder


4. Rename your high quality source the same as compressed/published MP4


5. Delete compressed/published MP4



https://player.vimeo.com/video/149072573



Mike




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 

byron tik

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

Brooke Tomoana

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?

Tim Wright

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

Steve Flowers

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. 

byron tik

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

Ed Gen

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?

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