Adding videos to your courses is an awesome way to change things up and keep learners engaged. And in Articulate Storyline, it’s super easy to include videos in your project. To get you going, I’d like to tell you three important things you should know about working with videos.

1. Storyline encodes your videos

One of the great features about Storyline is that you can use a number of different video format types (view supported video types). Then, when you publish your Storyline course, the publish process will automatically encode the movies you’ve included to .MP4 format. 

2. Storyline compresses your videos

We recommend inserting the highest quality videos into your course in order to get the highest quality video output. When you publish, Storyline will automatically compress the videos to preserve its high quality at the lowest possible file size (how Storyline compresses video files).

3. Flash files can be inserted as videos

You can easily and quickly add interactive SWF files (also known as Flash files) to your Storyline project. If your SWF file is a simple movie that learners watch which requires no interaction, you can insert the file from the Insert > Video option, which synchronizes the SWF with your slide timeline. You also have the option to insert your SWF file with the Insert > Flash option, if your SWF requires learner interaction.

These three basic but simple facts about working with video in Storyline will save you time and give you the best possible end result. Do you have experiences working with video in Storyline? If so, please share a comment with your story.

You can always sign up for a fully functional, free trial of Articulate software. And don’t forget to post your questions and comments in the forums! We’re here to help. For more e-learning tips, examples, and downloads, follow us on Twitter.

24 Comments
GAVIN INNES
Nicole Legault
Dave Lucas
Nicole Legault
Debra Bumgarner
Darlesa Cahoon
Franco Franco

Hello Everybody We are creating many storyline projects with inside many slides, each slide with a video or an animation. We are frustated due to the fact that after publishing the quality get drammatically corrupted. Huge work with high quality material... and at the end poor quality material....it doesn't make sense Replacing the files is and added work to do, but sorry you get crazy in trying to recognize 50 videos in the published folder with the file name not alligned respect to the source file. We tried other software and this is not happening. My opinion is that you should be allowed to decide the file compression, we know that you can but is not enough even if you set to maximum values. Another issue is that when you preview you should see the final work, but is not lik... Expand

Andy Houghton
John Reddinger

Greetings! I have a 31-slide Storyline 2 file. There is a single video in it, but that video needs to be playable at any point in the module. The way that I did this was by having a play button on every slide. This play button increments a variable called "PlayVideo". Then, on the master slide, I have a layer with the video on it, and a trigger that says to show the video layer whenever "PlayVideo" changes. This works beautifully, except that it seems that when I publish the file, storyline publishes out 31 copies of the exact same video -- one for each slide that it COULD appear on, even though it actually only appears on the master slide. This makes for an unacceptably large file size, and is a surprisingly huge inefficiency on SL's part. Streaming the video from an external ... Expand

John Reddinger
Nicole Legault
Thomas Elvins