With the increasingly growth of online education multimedia and open course ware from universities or non-profit organization, there are huge amount of learning materials in video format free for learners all around the world . Among those videos, simple video recorded lectures and animations are the format commonly seem. In the extant multimedia literatures, the effect of novelty and complexity of processed media are not well distinguished. In our study, a research model is developed to explain the effects among visual complexity and visual novelty features of an educational lecture video or an animation. An online experiment was conducted to test the model. The results suggested that a multimedia learner’s arousal and cognitive engagement can be evoked by visual novelty but decreased by visual complexity. Both arousal and cognitive engagement have carry-over effects on subsequent approach behavioral attitude toward the online educational clips. However, the salience of recall performance is dependent on initial aroused level, instead of depth of engaging cognitively.