Blurry screen recording videos

[Hildi_Pardo]

Hello, I find that the quality of screen recording videos with Canvas Studio is not sharp and is actually rather blurry once it's uploaded and viewed.  If I create tutorial videos, the user needs to be able to clearly see the text, icons, and images on the screen, but that is not my experience and that of some colleagues in other districts.  I would love to use Studio so I can model using it for teachers in my district, but the low video quality is making me look at other options.  It's difficult for me to promote the use of Studio to teachers if the video is blurry, and if I don't use it.  I certainly don't want to post blurry videos.

We also find that the quality is low when uploading a video recorded elsewhere.

@AkosFarago Would you know if it is something I'm doing, or a setting that needs to be changed to get a better quality video?  Asking for me and my colleagues.   Thanks!

For reference, here is a screenshot of what the video looks like:

[AkosFarago]

Hi @Hildi_Pardo ,

For the time being I sent it over to the team. Can you confirm that you are using Studio Capture or Screencast-o-matic for the screen recording?

Feel free to drop the video link to me in private message, that will help us identify the problem much easier.

Thank you for reporting this,

Akos

[Hildi_Pardo]

Awesome, thank you!    (I used the Screencast-o-matic so I could make edits).  Will send you the link to the video.

[AkosFarago]

@Hildi_Pardo the automated quality selection seems to err for this video. Please select a higher one under the settings icon, we will look into why it selected a low resolution automatically.

[Hildi_Pardo]

Ahh. Interesting. I manually changed my view to the higher quality which is better (not amazing, but definitely usable). That will be great if we could have the higher quality be the automatic selection for each user.  Thank you for looking at my instance and looking into why it went to low.

[AkosFarago]

@Hildi_Pardo and @dbrace  just a note on this, the video you uploaded is 956x720 which is, by definition, cannot be played back in higher resolution than 720p. This can be because either the recording was made on an external monitor with very low resolution or because you may have used Screencast-o-matic's region selector (given the unusual aspect ratio of the video) and you intentionally picked a small region of the screen.

In case it is the latter, than I'd suggest trying the Size selector and go for Hi-res in Screencast-o-matic in edit mode and see if it can scale it up for you. For example, I selected a 956x720 resolution part of my screen, but that's just how Screencast-o-matic defines the pixel count, my macbook in reality has much more pixels and can scale it up to high resolution, which in Studio will playback in 1080p.

And here is some sort of strange behaviour because when I do this, the video automatically selects 1080p for me. We'll see what we can do with this, until then I'd defer to the size selector on those cases.

[dbrace]

Hi @AkosFarago,

Thank you so much for that explanation, primarily the part about clicking on the "Canvas" option while it edit mode and the ability to select a "Hi-Res" option.

I have a 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro that is connected to a 32-inch LG 4K monitor. I typically do not record the entire screen (I select the portion that I want, my own form of cropping) and have never clicked on that before.

Through Studio's implementation of Screencast-o-Matic, do users (or Studio in its central configuration or even Studio admins at individual institutions) have the ability to set "Hi-Res" as the default so that the quality of a Screencast-o-Matic (even without going into "Edit" mode) is always the best possible (with the option to adjust to a lower quality while editing or during playback; for during playback, in either an automated or manual way)?

-Doug

[dbrace]

Playing back a lower quality version of a video might seem like a good idea but more displays/screens are considered to be "high res". It can be a challenge to balance quality and compatibility, both from a recording perspective (the content creator) and a playback perspective (the content consumer).

I am interested to see/hear how this will be handled for the automatic experience and manual override.

-Doug