Video compression option greyed out - did not edit in Storyline

Videos are blurry when published, fine when previewed. Have selected max quality for publishing. The compress option is greyed out for videos after importing as mp4 from Camtasia. This is going to make Storyline unworkable for my online course as the text from screen is almost unreadable. HELP!

I had this problem when I updated an existing video with a new version of the video. I found that if I created a new blank slide, then imported the updated video, the compression option was no longer grayed out. I then deleted the slide that included the previous version of the video. My videos are all saved at 1080p mp4 from Camtasia, CODEC H.264, audio 128 kps.

Hi Mark,

If you want - you could to try attaching a small snippet of the video to this thread, and I could try importing it into a new storyline project and see if compression is grayed out for me. I'm using the latest update of Camtasia 2021, but I've been using Camtasia for a few years, and after I stopped trying to update video slides, this glitch never recurred.

I just tried to export selection (green/red in out points) from Camtasia, (your snippet) and it came in with compression box active......Let me see if this trick works for the entire thing

Hi Brad,

Using selection handles in Camtasia and then Produce Selection as MP4only (up to 1080p) seems to let me bring this video in with compression options active in Storyline. Setting compression to None is essential to get the published quality good (Compression = automatic is blurry, for the same video).

(Ultimately I'm not sure whether this is really doing anything other than forcing a Camtasia refresh and that is what is really "solving" the problem. )

A bit odd. I do tend to use the selection handles and right-click to produce the selection at 1080p - but I also import smaller full videos (50-100 MB) without using the handles or the "produce selection" option without losing the option in Storyline to choose no compression.

Hi, Mark.

Thank you for sharing what you're experiencing!

If I try to crop the video in Storyline even after setting compression to none, the cropping results in compression changing to greyed out automatic. 

This is the expected behavior, as editing the file within Storyline will disable the option to turn compression off. 

Another in the long long line of limitations within Articulate - I'm getting sick of it at this stage. 

Articulate, please provide us the option to turn off compression regardless of profiles and the usage of the built-in editor. The current limitations are horrible as the videos looks fine during a preview, but looses far too much quality when published, even if you set static quality to max.

We have videos explaining to students where to find certain information. It's crisp and sharp during a preview, and now we've discovered that when we publish the course it's so blurry it's impossible to see what's going on on some of them.

We've already compressed them beforehand in professional software with functionality that provides the control to actually finetune this process, and I would believe many professional designers do the same.

if you can set "Compression None", "Adaptive" has ALWAYS a reduced quality

e.g.

Static (original) .mp4

audio: 125 kb/s, 48 kHz, 2 channel AAC LC
video: 795 kb/s, 1920x1080, 25 FPS, AVC (Main@L4.1)

Adaptive .ts

stream_0: audio 22.05 kHz, 1 channel, AAC LC
stream_1: video 1920x1080 - 1441 kb/s
stream_2: video 1920x1080 - 855 kb/s
stream_3: video 1920x1080 - 501 kb/s

=> result:

• doubled bandwidth with comparable video quality: 795 kb/s -> 1441 kb/s
• audio quality reduction: stereo 20 Hz ... 24 kHz -> mono 20 hz .. 11 kHz

and publishing is very slow, because of 3 x (re)compression for the different video streams

and it's not compatible file:// (local playback)

and it's not compatible to some (?) LMS