Video file sizes changing

Aug 27, 2018

Hi community,

I am trying to upload videos to Rise or 360 Review, but every time I do, the file size gets increased dramatically. I am uploading a 40mb file and when I attempt to re-download the same file it is 160mb!!! What is Rise/360 Review doing to my video files? Is it increasing the bitrate without my consent? Is there a limit to how low a bitrate can be or something?

Please advise.

21 Replies
Leslie McKerchie

Hey Ros,

Thanks for reaching out and sharing that you are seeing a difference in your file sizes. We would certainly want to take a look at that.

I wanted to clarify where you are seeing an increase in size and understand the steps you are taking.

  • Are you adding a video to Rise, then publishing to Review? 
  • When you mention re-downloading the same file, where are you downloading from?
  • Would you be able to share the video file you are using so that we could take a look at replicating this behavior?
Ros McNamee

Unfortunately I cannot share any videos due to policies, but what I am doing is compressing a video to 70mb using Media Encoder. I can see the file size in Windows and in the Export. I upload the video to a Rise course and I then Export to LMS. The Course size goes from 1MB, with nothing in it, to 160MB with a 70MB file in it. Usually when you Scorm ZIP, it compresses video/images, but Rise seems to un-compress or something.

Another thing I tried was uploading the video to 360 Review and using that file in Rise instead. So when I uploaded the file to 360 Review, I download it immediately and it has the same file size. BUT, I wait for it to become available in Rise (I assume after the upload there is a processing time). After this time has passed and I can access the upload through Rise, I go to download the same file again from 360 Review, but the file size has doubled.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Thanks, Ros for the additional explanation. I took a look and we've seen at least one other report of this. I understand if you're not able to not share your file, but that would help us demonstrate the problem and test any possible solutions or fixes.

We'd happily accept a copy of the video shared here privately if you change your mind, or if you want to let us know the course title and lesson that the video is added into our team can take a look inside Rise for that.

I will include your discussion here in the report our team is investigating, so I'll keep you posted if there are any updates! 

Chris Lynch

Hi! I just worked around this issue the "hard way". Basically, just replace the videos in your SCORM package manually with smaller compressed versions.

1) Take your SCORM package from Rise and unzip it and open it.

2) Open the /scormcontent/assets folder (that contains all of your videos, images, pdfs, etc.). The new filenames for your media contain a bunch of random numbers and letters plus your original filename. You'll probably notice Rise has, for whatever reason, increased the filesize pretty drastically from what it was. 

3) Take your smaller video and rename it to the SCORM version of the video. Delete the current videos in the SCORM package and then paste in your smaller videos making sure the names are identical.

4) Re-Zip your SCORM package. You should see that its now smaller overall!

I was able to turn a 450mb scorm full of videos into a more manageable 200mb. Not ideal, but way better than before.

Maxime Chelet
Stacey La Hack

Was there an outcome or solution for this? We are still having to advise people in our business to do what Chris has suggested above or to host their videos on Stream - because they are new to Rise and making courses which end up being 1-2G when without the videos they are tiny files.

+1

Still working around the issue the hard way here.

Jose Tansengco

Hi Christine, 

I wanted to share a possible explanation for why the published output is increasing in size when videos are added to your Rise 360 course. 

The increase happens with videos that are low resolution and recorded with low bitrates. The audio bitrate for videos with low bitrates is increased when uploaded, and the video data rate is also increased to improve video playback. This happens in the background automatically. As a troubleshooting step, try uploading a video with higher resolution and bitrate to see if this keeps the file size at a more expected level. You can also open a case with our support team here if you have any additional questions about the increase in file size!