Panopto: June 2022 Update Brings New Features and Improvements

Headline Features

Creation

Instant Edit

Lightning-fast post-edit video processing allows creators to publish videos just seconds after completing their edits.  This minimizes downtime for viewers and speeds up all aspects of post-production and publishing workflows.

Smart chapters

Panopto’s unique, AI-powered Smart Chapters feature automatically indexes videos with a table of contents by analyzing screen recordings – even for meeting recordings and Capture recordings where Panopto does not have access to directly index the slide deck. This feature will now be enabled by default to create video chaptering automatically.

Smart Chapters

Accessibility

Caption Editing

• Find and Replace ASR-powered caption editing enables customers to quickly identify captions that may need to be edited using confidence highlights, and to replace all instances of an incorrectly transcribed word based on one initial manual correction
• Custom, site-level dictionaries for ASR and OCR allow customers to list common specialized terms, proper nouns, and other words that have a unique prevalence at their institution. Learn more at: How to Create a Custom Dictionary
• AI-powered caption translation – using Panopto caption dollars – can now be requested by customers, allowing for simple, one-step language translation based on ASR or service-created captions
• Caption end-time support ensures that closed captions that specify an end-time will now be honored by Panopto’s viewer, to improve the user experience and accessibility by clearing the prior caption when it no longer applies, as opposed to waiting until the next caption is displayed

Find & Replace

Captions can now specify an end-time

Multi-language ASR and multi-language search  

• The ASR caption and search language can now be set per folder or per department.  This enables administrators to set the preferred ASR caption language for the expected input so that captioning can reflect the language used in the initial recording
• ASR reprocessing allows customers to easily switch languages when a specific video was recorded in a different language than the pre-set default language for its containing folder
• An update to the automated speech-to-text engine has improved ASR caption quality, across all supported languages.

Portal visual refresh

A new design refresh brings a modernized look and feel to the main video portal and embedded folder views.  User icons replace text-based username and help menu items, a clean and prominent Create + button is repositioned for greater impact and usability, and the search bar is now restyled and centralized

Home

Create menu

Browse menu

Management

Content retention and archive

• Admin users can now download CSVs for retention audits that include additional data points  Folder, Last View, Archived Status, and Owner.  Users will also receive improved audit summary emails that sum and report the total number of video hours modified for each type of retention action
• Customers are now able to use content retention policies to delete archived videos
• Content creators can archive specific videos directly and instantly, from video settings, rather than waiting for a retention policy.
• In search results, customers will now see archived and ready-to-view videos together.
• In folder list views, customers will find an easily accessible toggle between archived and ready-to-view videos, including embedded folders

Archive toggle in folder header

Archive toggle in embedded folder view

Custom user roles and access management

Panopto has added several new user roles to improve organizational flexibility by allowing non-admin users access to key functionality at the site, department, and folder level

• Analytics manager
• Users with this role can browse and list folders and videos, view usage dashboards, and download usage CSVs.  If granted at the site level, users with this role can request offline usage reports
• Caption Requester
• Users with this role can manage caption settings for folders and videos, request captions, upload captions, and enable folder-level settings for default content language and automated captioning
• Content organizer
• Users with this role can fulfill core content management duties, including: moving content between folders, copying content, creating folders, deleting folders, videos and playlists, sharing videos, viewing videos, and updating video metadata
• Viewer with link
• This allows users access that behaves like the current share function “Anyone at your org with the link”, but limits this to specific users or groups

Panopto will now also allow existing roles to be modified or duplicated

• Role modification allows customer admins to modify a limited set of permissions for each of the built-in roles, except Administrator.
• Role duplication allows customers to create a new role based on an existing role, give it a custom name, and then modify it to meet the unique needs of their organization.

Roles list

Adjusting the optional capabilities for the Creator role

Integrations

Teams application single-sign-on

Note: This feature is already available on production clouds, ahead of the Cancun release

Users of Panopto’s app for Microsoft Teams will now be able to directly access Panopto videos and from within Team thanks to automatic single-sign-on between Teams and Panopto.  Admin configuration is required to enable this new SSO functionality, learn more.

Beta releases

Capture Live – Technical Preview

Coming soon in the June 25th release: The Technical Preview release of Capture Live will allow customers to test new features of Panopto’s browser-based Capture tool that allows multiple users to present together.  Up to 4 users can join a Capture session for direct conversation and screen sharing.  Users can choose to either live broadcast the Capture session as a Panopto Webcast or record it for asynchronous video-on-demand viewing.  This technical preview is meant to get your early feedback and is not yet intended for production use.

Behavior and Settings changes

The following behaviors have changed in this release:

• Panopto’s native video recording applications can now be downloaded exclusively from the Create menu, where it naturally falls in users’ creation workflows; the download link in the portal page header has been removed, to reduce complexity and improve usability.
• Granting users site-wide roles, such as Administrator, Videographer, and Caption Requestor has moved from the Info tab of the User settings modal to the Access tab. Added sections for Site and Department roles to the Access settings page for both users and groups.
• Removed the beta version of the Custom Roles feature, along with any roles created on test sites, in favor of the new Custom Roles feature, which is now available for all customers.
• Added a find and replace toolbar to the caption editing experience within the Panopto video editor.
• Added keyboard shortcuts for common actions used during caption editing, including pausing and resuming video playback, at the current caption’s time-point.
• On the “Manage” section of video settings, the setting “Disable seek and variable speed playback” has changed to “Seek and variable speed playback behavior”.

Settings updates

The following settings have changed in this release:

• Features – Multi-language Automatic Captioning and Smart Features
  • This setting is now enabled, for all customers, allowing the use of multiple languages within a single Panopto site
• Features – Smart Chapters
  • This setting is now set to “Automatically add to my videos”, for all customers
• Features – Viewer – Disable Seek and Variable Speed Playback (VSP)
  • This setting is now called “Features – Viewer – Control Seek and Variable Speed Playback (VSP)”.  Customers’ existing choice for the old setting was migrated to the new setting, so there is no behavior change for end users in this release.

The following settings have been removed in this release:

• Enable Delete for Admins Only
  • This functionality is now controlled via an optional capability on the Creator role
• Folders – Ability for Creators to Add New Folders
  • This functionality is now controlled via an optional capability on the Creator role

Improvements and fixes

VCMS & User experience

• Fixed an issue with attaching pdf files to videos, where if the filename contained Japanese characters, the upload would fail.
• Improved the folder browsing experience with a prominent toggle between archived and ready-to-view videos, to make it easier for users to find and restore archived videos.
• In search results, archived and ready-to-view videos are now displayed together, with an option to hide the archived videos.
• Updated the default image displayed for videos before a thumbnail can be extracted from the video or before a user uploads a custom image.
• Increased the image sizes displayed in video lists and search results.

Capture

• Fixed an issue with Capture where authentication would expire and recordings could prematurely end, when the site setting “Security – Timeout (Cookies) for Authenticated Users” was modified to have a period shorter than the recording duration.

Viewer

• Fixed an issue in the embed player where quizzes would sometimes not be shown to viewers if the quiz was at the very end of the video.
• Removed all fall-back support for Internet Explorer 11.

Editor

• The option to replace existing ASR captions will now only be available for the language of those captions instead of all languages.
• Find and Replace ASR-powered caption editing enables customers to quickly identify captions that may need to be edited using confidence highlights, and to replace all instances of an incorrectly transcribed word based on one initial manual correction
• Caption end-times can now be manually set or modified in the editor, by expanding settings for individual captions.

Role and access management

• Added a new role, Content Organizer, with optional capabilities that will allow users to perform actions such as moving, updating, and sharing content within a site, department, or folder.
• Added a new role, Caption Requester, that allows users to manage caption settings for folders and videos, request captions, and upload captions.
• Added a new role, Caption Requester for Creators, allowing users to request captions where they have creator access.
• Added a new role, Analytics Manager, that allows users to browse and view folders and videos, view usage dashboards and download CSVs, and request usage reports (if the role is granted at the site level).
• Added a new role, Viewer with Link, that allows users to view folder contents or videos if they have the link.
• The built-in Viewer role now has an optional capability that allows admins to override folder and video download settings.  This may be useful to create a custom “Viewer with Download” role to provide download capabilities to select users and groups.
• Added the ability to filter by one or more roles on the User Groups administrator page.

Integrations

• Fixed an issue with course folder provisioning where, in rare circumstances where the root identity provider folder was set to require approval, newly created course folders would inherit permissions from their parent folder.
• Fixed an issue with the BlackBoard Classic integration where configuring a course to use multiple folders could fail when used with the beta of Custom Roles.

Media

• Video edits now process instantly.

API

• Added a new API to delete captions for the specified language in the recording.