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W
Welshdreamer
Inspiring
December 4, 2013
Question

Poor video recording quality with Presenter 9

  • December 4, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 834 views

I'm trialling Presenter 9 and Captivate 7.

I have a Compaq CQ61-320SA latop with a 2.2 Ghz dual core processor and 8 Gb RAM. It's 3 or 4 years old. The Display Adaptor entry in Device Manager says it has Mobile Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family (Microsoft) and the driver is up to date. (I should say that HP's product spec page for my laptop says that 'Video Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce 8200M G which confuses me as Device manager is listing it as Mobile Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family?)

When I record full screen in Presenter (it seems you are restricted to full screen recording in Presenter, unlike in Captivate), the resulting MP4 is rendered in high quality. The fonts in the video look nice and sharp. However, if I import the video into Powerpoint with the Adobe Presenter add in and then publish it to a folder on my PC with the 'lossless' setting and then click on the file 'index.html' the playback quality in my browser (Internet Explorer 11) is much lower. The fonts look 'blocky'.

I don't think it can be PC specification because if I record full screen in Captivate 7 and import the MP4 file into a new project and publish it, the quality of the published slide is great. (Again, I click on  the 'index.html' file to play the published video).

Does this mean that Presenter is not as good as Captivate in terms of its video recording quality? Are the encoding engines different?

I love the webcam PIP functionality and simplicity of Presenter but the seemingly low video quality versus Captivate is an issue for me.

Any ideas/thoughts would be appreciated.

Peter

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1 reply

W
WelshdreamerAuthor
Inspiring
December 10, 2013

I may have answered my own question. This weekend I bought a top of the range quad core laptop with a high specification graphics card.

Whilst I don't see any real difference in the playback quality of MP4 files made with the Adobe Presenter video creator tool in the new laptop versus my old laptop (both render excellent quality MP4 video files), when published to HTML from the Presenter PowerPoint plugin, the new laptop produces much better quality video. Ior example, I can clearly see the text detail in the icons in the ribbon of MS Word 2013 whereas the text in these ribbon icons looked very 'blocky' with the old machine.

So I'm pleased I may have found a solution. On the other hand, I'm wondering what the reason behind the better conversion from PowerPoint to HTML in the new laptop is? Surely, the improved graphics card can't be the reason for that can it?

Peter

W
WelshdreamerAuthor
Inspiring
December 11, 2013

After playing with Presenter more, I've come to the conclusion that the degradation in quality from the original MP4 video file (that Presenter generates with its video creator tool) to the reduced quality after importing the MP4 into PowerPoint and publishing the course to HTML is probably due to a scaling issue. I've read elsewhere on this forum and on the Camtasia forum that whenever you re-scale a video, you lose clarity. The fact is that Presenter only allows recording of the entitre screen. When you import a full screen recording into a PowerPoint slide, because the slide itself is of a size lower than full screen, the original full screen dimension in the video is scaled down.

I'm thinking that the higher specification graphics card in the new laptop I talked about in the previous post produces a higher quality MP4 video in the first place so that the effect of the scaling down when imported into PowerPoint is more acceptable.

Any comments?

Peter

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