Cropping video for elearning in Storyline

Video content is an important component of elearning, just look at all the things you can learn off of YouTube! Next to having a real instructor teaching you in real time, video is the next best thing. Having a video can show your learner things that a series of words or pictures can’t communicate, and add motion to an otherwise static slide in your elearning.

When adding a video to your elearning in Storyline, you may not want to have the video image fill the whole frame. It’s easy enough to resize your video; just grab a corner and drag it to the size you want. However, you might also want to crop it to a different aspect ratio to fit into a specific space you have allocated, or to just highlight a part of the video without making the whole video smaller. Cropping a video in Storyline isn’t quite as easy as cropping an image.

In order to crop your video without having to use external software, you can use the Edit video option when you right-click on the video.

The Crop function is the third icon on the top left. However, you will have to do some math in order to crop it to specific dimensions you want when it renders to the elearning.

If you want your cropped video to have specific dimensions in your elearning slide, the first thing you have to do is find the exact dimensions of the rectangle you want it to fit.

For instance, suppose I want a video in this space outlined in yellow on this slide.

Find out the exact dimensions of that box by drawing a rectangle to fit. In this case, the yellow rectangle is 268 px x 720 px. You can find this out in the Drawing Tools Format tab when the rectangle is selected.

Now, once you’ve imported a video, either from your own library or the Storyline Content Library 360, and gone into the Edit Video screen, you will see in the bottom right what the actual dimensions of the original video are, and the dimensions of your current crop.

At full size, this video is 1920 x 1080, and if you’re using full height, divide the larger value by the smaller value (1080 / 720), in this case we get 1.5. Now you just need to multiply the crop rectangle width by this amount (268 * 1.5 = 402), that gives you the enlarged video width, and you can crop to those exact dimensions as indicated in the Crop values.

Then once you’ve saved and closed out of the video editor, your video will be the exact right shape for your elearning!