Working with video files in Articulate Storyline
One of the advantages of working with Articulate Storyline is that you get to work with different kinds of media, whether it’s audio, images or video, to augment the interactivity of your eLearning course. You can even embed external resources like websites or interactions made in H5P or Padlet.
However, we must be careful when working with these resources for several reasons, including:
When using h5p or padlet, keep in mind that these platforms are subscription based, so for eLearning modules that have long shelf lives, you need the keep subscriptions active or find another resource with similar functionality
Images, audio and video from external resources usually come with copyright, so make sure you have permission to use them and add proper citations
Among those resources, we need to pay special attention to video files. Video files are inherently larger in file size that other type of media, so it becomes challenging when you have several video files in your eLearning course, you will realise the not only do these files increase the file size of you .story file, by it also increases the time your computer saves to write changes to the file.
Also, keep in mind that Storyline will compress the videos, so most times you will lose quality of the videos in the published courses.
One of the issues we encountered while developing a client’s eLearning course was that, since the video was approximately 18 minutes long, the course would freeze close the 16-minute mark, which was strange given that we didn’t have any triggers to cause this behaviour.
How did we solve it?
We didn’t have any precedents to go on solving the issue, however, we found that turning off the automatic compression of the video (in Storyline) would get rid of the freezing issue. Now, this makes a bit of sense, since compression and decompression is a computational challenge for our computers, and since these are web-based courses, it might cause issues in some computers, which was our case, because not all our computers would replicate the issue.
