It doesn't seem to matter whether I publish to Articulate Online, YouTube, or just watch the video via Flashplayer, the content is always too blurry to see. Is there a setting I'm missing? It's important that my clients be able to actually see the videos in order to learn how to use our products so I need to figure out if this can be fixed or if I'll need to find a different recording product to use.
Nancy, I have the setting at 100%. I'm creating the video via "record a screen" I need the users to see my go through these screens and enter data in selected fields, etc. like a "how to" video. I have several different product modules I'm making videos for so it's not just that my product screen is poor quality. If you need an example I can submit one...
I find that these screen recordings can be a little fuzzy. Sorry more questions, when you preview the video in Storyline (before publishing) do the videos look any crisper? If this is the case you can export the videos. After publishing, you can then go to the published output folder and replace the videos with the ones you exported. Storyline compresses video too much on publish to get the file size down so replacing the videos with the uncompressed ones usually does the trick.
If the video quality looks bad in the preview then there isn't much you can do with the existing videos. You might have to take a look at how you are recording the screen. Is, for example, your browser set to the same dimensions as your recording area?
Hi Megan, I did a quick and dirty demo for you showing how you can improve the quality by adjusting the dimensions of the area you are recording. I recorded my website twice - in the first instance I resized the Storyline recording area to match the dimensions of my browser. The browser was 1916 by 930 so I resized the screen recording area to be that size. As you will see the video is fuzzy.
In the second instance, I changed the dimensions of my browser to fit the size of my Storyline project dimensions - I just used the default 720 x 540 so made my browser window the same size. The video is a lot clearer (the downside is that I have to do more scrolling). I think the trick is to play around with the dimensions until you get the best result. It seems to work best when the size of the screen you are recording is the same as the size of the Storyline presentation.
So I am coming here 3 years after this was last discussed but just in case anyone else comes here for help I wanted to bring up what I found out.
The quality of your video directly depends on the size of your slides, also known as the "Story Size". If you have slides that are smaller then the dimensions of your video it will become squashed and blurry when you publish. Even though it looks fine while you are building the project. If you are able to increase the size of the slides this should fix the issue.
We were not able to do this as we had many markers thought the many story lines we just created that we would have had to go through and reposition. So our work around was to have the video open in browser and not in the slide when you click the video. However the video still sat in the slide looking gross.
As far as I can tell you cannot use a marker to make a play button that opens the video in the browser. They only work for videos that play in the slide. So our compromise was to right click the video and set a poster frame that was an image of a play button. We had videos if varying dimensions, but since the video is not playing in the slide we changed the dimensions of the in slide video to match the play button image. Changing these does not have any effect on the video that opens in the browser once the user clicks. The only downside is that the play button gets a bit grainy like the video preview. But this is much less noticeable.
On a side note, when working with a poster frame in a published story line i kept seeing an issue where the "play button" would disappear when the slide was kept open for the duration of the video. We got around this by extending the timeline of that slide and then dragging the video layer out to the new duration. My best guess is that this is caused by a coding conflict where the time line and the video end at the same moment. Cause once I added just an extra second of duration to the timeline of the slide the key frame would no longer vanish.
5 Replies
Hi Megan, can you tell us a little bit more about the video? Did you create it in Storyline or import it from another source?
Have you tried changing the quality setting on the publish page? It sometimes helps if you change the setting for video to 100%.
Nancy, I have the setting at 100%. I'm creating the video via "record a screen" I need the users to see my go through these screens and enter data in selected fields, etc. like a "how to" video. I have several different product modules I'm making videos for so it's not just that my product screen is poor quality. If you need an example I can submit one...
I find that these screen recordings can be a little fuzzy. Sorry more questions, when you preview the video in Storyline (before publishing) do the videos look any crisper? If this is the case you can export the videos. After publishing, you can then go to the published output folder and replace the videos with the ones you exported. Storyline compresses video too much on publish to get the file size down so replacing the videos with the uncompressed ones usually does the trick.
If the video quality looks bad in the preview then there isn't much you can do with the existing videos. You might have to take a look at how you are recording the screen. Is, for example, your browser set to the same dimensions as your recording area?
Hi Megan, I did a quick and dirty demo for you showing how you can improve the quality by adjusting the dimensions of the area you are recording. I recorded my website twice - in the first instance I resized the Storyline recording area to match the dimensions of my browser. The browser was 1916 by 930 so I resized the screen recording area to be that size. As you will see the video is fuzzy.
In the second instance, I changed the dimensions of my browser to fit the size of my Storyline project dimensions - I just used the default 720 x 540 so made my browser window the same size. The video is a lot clearer (the downside is that I have to do more scrolling). I think the trick is to play around with the dimensions until you get the best result. It seems to work best when the size of the screen you are recording is the same as the size of the Storyline presentation.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/73851/Untitled1%20output/story.html
So I am coming here 3 years after this was last discussed but just in case anyone else comes here for help I wanted to bring up what I found out.
The quality of your video directly depends on the size of your slides, also known as the "Story Size". If you have slides that are smaller then the dimensions of your video it will become squashed and blurry when you publish. Even though it looks fine while you are building the project. If you are able to increase the size of the slides this should fix the issue.
We were not able to do this as we had many markers thought the many story lines we just created that we would have had to go through and reposition. So our work around was to have the video open in browser and not in the slide when you click the video. However the video still sat in the slide looking gross.
As far as I can tell you cannot use a marker to make a play button that opens the video in the browser. They only work for videos that play in the slide. So our compromise was to right click the video and set a poster frame that was an image of a play button. We had videos if varying dimensions, but since the video is not playing in the slide we changed the dimensions of the in slide video to match the play button image. Changing these does not have any effect on the video that opens in the browser once the user clicks. The only downside is that the play button gets a bit grainy like the video preview. But this is much less noticeable.
On a side note, when working with a poster frame in a published story line i kept seeing an issue where the "play button" would disappear when the slide was kept open for the duration of the video. We got around this by extending the timeline of that slide and then dragging the video layer out to the new duration. My best guess is that this is caused by a coding conflict where the time line and the video end at the same moment. Cause once I added just an extra second of duration to the timeline of the slide the key frame would no longer vanish.
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