This chapter reviews the features of Storyline that enable external media assets to be incorporated into an e-learning course. The methods and supported file types are explored along with steps for importing media, working with web objects, and creating interactive software simulations with recorded video.
In this chapter, you will learn:
- How to work with media in Storyline
- Supported media
- How to import and embed media assets
- The basics of screen recordings, settings, and playback modes
- Creating emphasis with pans and zooms
Media comes in many flavors; we've already touched on images in Chapter 2, Adding Content into your Story and in Chapter 4, Adding Characters and Audio, now we'll shift the focus to video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then video is priceless. Video is one of the most effective tools to create an emotional impact. That is, if video is done well, produced properly, and for the right reasons (to support learning objectives).
Storyline handles a video well. There are a variety of options that allow you to bring video into your courses, and also perform basic editing tasks like trimming and cropping. Storyline also handles video compression very well, dramatically reducing the size of imported videos after publishing a course without degrading quality.
But that's not where things stop. You can use Storyline's video features to bring in elements that you have created in other tools, such as Articulate Studio, Quizmaker or Engage, as well as Adobe Flash and Captivate. You can even bring in content that you didn't create directly from the web, such as YouTube videos.
The net result is that you're able to not only re-use previously created content, but also expand your content by curating from the external sources. Powerful stuff indeed.