StoryFile Video Format Recommendations

This document provides recommended video settings when you export videos for Conversa. 

You can upload videos individually or as a batch upload. Video uploads consist of two phases: an “Upload” phase where the data is transferred, and a “Processing” phase where the video format is analyzed and to maximize compatibility on multiple devices and resolutions.  Ultimately all videos will be automatically encoded as H264 MPEG-4 videos at 1080p, 720p, 480p and 360p for streaming video..  H264 is a well-accepted standard for streaming video

If possible, we recommend uploading videos as 1080p MPEG-4 videos to balance data-transfer times and reduce additional quality loss when transcoding video between different codecs.

While it is possible to export MPEG-4 videos directly from software like Adobe Premiere and After Effects, we have found that the built-in Adobe algorithms (licensed from Mainconcept) do not perform well at low-size output for a given quality target or quality for a given bit rate target.  As a result, we recommend exporting lossless video from Adobe software or another package, and reencoding the video with the ffmpeg command line too (https://ffmpeg.org)l  or HandBrake video transcoder (https://handbrake.fr/).  Both software packages are free, open-source, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. These programs use RF as a compression value, with a lower value RF being a higher bit rate, and the opposite is true, a higher value RF is a lower bit rate. A target RF value of 24 works best in Conversa.