by Kal Hadi, COTP
When teaching my students how to publish Articulate Storyline projects during my beginner class, I often get the following question:
Student: “How do I publish my project as a video (MP4)?”
Me: “You can’t.”
Cue the crickets along with disappointed comments in the chat pod, especially from Adobe Captivate users (Captivate has been able to publish projects as a video for years).
Why would a Storyline developer want to publish a project as a video (especially when you lose any interactivity you've built into the slides)? Video files are self-contained. They can be viewed on just about any device without the need for a web browser. You can email the video output to a colleague who does not have Storyline, so they can view your slides. And published videos can be uploaded into video streaming servers such as YouTube and Vimeo.
Given that publishing as a video has been a requested Storyline feature for some time, I’m happy to report that Articulate Storyline 360 now allows you to publish a single video of a Slide, a Scene, or the Entire Course.
There are some settings and best practice options in the Publish to Video dialog box we’ll discuss.

Under Size and Quality, there are a few choices:
- Dimensions. This is where you can select a size for video from a drop-down menu. If video size is not a factor, you can go as high as full 1080p HD for nice quality.
- You have two sliders for Video and Audio Quality that ranges from Low to Very High. There is of course a tradeoff between quality and file size. High is usually a good choice.
- “Set the same volume level for all audio” makes all sounds volume consistent throughout the project. If you want to keep the volume the same as you originally had it in the Storyline project, deselect this option.
- Prior to publishing, you can also control how the slides flow (or the Navigation). You can either follow the “next” button actions in your course, or show the slides sequentially based on their slide number (1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, and so on).
If you need to publish a course to video, I suggest that you duplicate the project and prepare a copy for video output that automatically goes through all content flow without missing main content stored in layers. You’ll likely need to adjust the Triggers so they execute automatically. For example, if a user needs to click a button to show a specific layer, you can adjust the Triggers so one layer shows when the timeline of a previous layer end.
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Thanks for delving into this subject. I've used Captivate since v3 but I'm quite new to Storyline, and haven't yet had a need to look beyond the Video tab into the options there. I love the ability to choose between "Next actions" or slide numbering. High quality audio is always a good idea and most encoders will up-sample to 48kHz for video anyway, so I always record it that way in the first place.
I'd like to point out that interactivity can be returned, and quizzing added, if the video is posted to a WordPress or Drupal site, using the "Interactive Video" library available with the H5P plugin. "H5P empowers everyone to create rich and interactive web experiences..." The video itself can be uploaded to the site or hosted on YouTube.
Another important tool in my shed is Open Broadcaster Software, a free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. With OBS you can make an MP4 of anything and everything you can see or hear on your computer.
Both of these have "dot org" URLs and are easily found using Google.
Posted by: Richard Fouchaux | April 04, 2018 at 10:16 AM