Exporting Canvas Studio videos - bulk

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I recently discovered that when exporting course content to move from one institution to another instructor created Canvas Studio videos do not export along with the rest of the content.  Not only is this problematic for faculty teaching at multiple institutions, it is also problematic for backup purposes.  

Many faculty may not work at the college for a year or two and thus may want/need to backup - export all their course materials to an external source for safekeeping.  

There is currently no way to bulk back up / export Canvas Studio library files.  This may also be of use to students who want to keep their own CS created videos for later reference.  

Please create a way for faculty to download multiple CS videos at one time - along with the captions. 

Thank you for prioritizing this!

Valerie Senior

11 Comments
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Moderating
 
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Open
 
bishopta
Community Member

I completely agree that this should already be a feature. I have seen many other users asking about this in the conversations section. I began trying to download my videos. However,  I have to do it one by one and it takes WAY more time that I have to give. I believe these videos should belong to me because I put in the time to create them. It should not be this much work to back up my own content. Thank you for listening to our feedback and needs.

Landmark_Coll
Community Participant

This idea dovetails nicely with this one:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/Enable-Admin-Upload-for-Canvas-Studio/idi-p/35...

As an admin, the inability to upload and download videos on behalf of users, both individually and in bulk, is tremendously cumbersome. Similarly, the inability to change video ownership at the admin level is frustrating when there is instructor turnover in a course.

ProfessorBeyrer
Community Coach
Community Coach

Thank you @vsenior for including captions in your request. This is an excellent idea.

James
Community Champion

At first, bulk downloads sounds like a great feature to add. That changes when I put thought into it.

The functionality to download videos (more precisely the link that delivers the video and then you'll have to fetch and save it) and captions is already present through the API. When I think about the technical requirements for bulk downloads, I end up with the conclusion that it should remain something accessed through the API and not something the that should be added to the Canvas Studio interface.

Downloading even one video can take a long time as it is (I don't have broadband speeds) and trying to download all of the videos for a user / course could be prohibitively long. I currently have about 900 videos in Studio that run about 68 hours. The videos are transcoded for different resolutions to aid streaming, but the original videos that I uploaded (and the ones most likely to download) were often higher resolution / larger size.

Then you have the issue of having to zip them into a container so they can be downloaded as a single file (otherwise people need to alter their browser config to allow multiple downloads). Even with no compression, that takes storage as much as the files trying to be downloaded and then there is the very real possibility that you would get a file you couldn't do anything with (not enough space to download and extract). That storage has to take part on Canvas end as well and it takes time -- time people using a browser don't like to wait for. It would likely relegate it to a background task rather than real-time.

Someone could write a program that downloads multiple files and the caption files by accessing the API. It could download them one at a time and keep track of which files it had downloaded. That allows you to download the files incrementally without having to wait for the files to be combined or taking double the storage. The API provides links to the different transcodes, so people could also choose what resolution they wanted to download.

Landmark_Coll
Community Participant

@James Where is this API you speak of? I'm not aware that any API exists for Studio. If it does this would be huge news.

James
Community Champion

@Landmark_Coll

There are actually 2 APIs.

  • Studio Public API is like the Canvas Live API in that it allows you to try things out from the web. This is the one they push, but it mostly allows for media management (uploading, adding captions, tag management). It does not allow you to download captions, clone media, or get analytics.
  • The Arconaut's Manual 1.0 is the more powerful of the two but documentation is kind of scant and it took me a lot of playing around to figure things out. This lets you create, update, delete media, upload and download captions, manage your tags, and get analytics. This is the one I use as it has everything the public API has and then more.

Both of those pages are available at your instructuremedia.com instance and you will need to change the hostname if you want to try out the public API through the browser.

As some ideas of what you can do, here are some of the things I've done using the Arconaut's API. You're rate limited to about one API call per second, so when I say "quickly", it's a relative term compared to doing it through Canvas Studio itself.

  • Create a synchronization between the data in Canvas Studio and a spreadsheet so that I could quickly standardize my tags and make changes to descriptions and titles. I run one script to get all the data from Canvas Studio into the spreadsheet and another one that reads the spreadsheet looking for changes and then writes the changes to Canvas Studio. The spreadsheet also serves as a local warehouse of information, so I can quickly find videos, what pages they're on inside Canvas, how long they are, etc.
  • Create standardized thumbnails by bringing the data from the spreadsheet into Adobe Illustrator and putting the title and a subtitle on the thumbnail and then uploading the thumbnails into Canvas Studio.
  • Check all of my media to see if they are captioned. If not, start the auto-captioning process. If there are generated captions that I forgot to publish, it publishes those. I typically do this by date or collection ID since it takes a while to check all of the videos and after I run the scripts once, I know that I'm current up to a certain date and don't need to check prior to that anymore.
  • Automatically add videos to pages in Canvas based on their Media ID. I put the Media ID on a line by itself and then run my script. My script takes the data from the spreadsheet and replaces the media ID with a heading, the description that is in Canvas Studio, and the embed code needed to display the video. This script doesn't call Studio directly, but the script to get the data into the database does.
  • Download an entire course worth of video watching. I cycle through all of the media used in a course, get the insights information, and then put it into a spreadsheet where I can do pivot tables to analyze the results. By the way, insights are not reliable and students should not be used as the sole means of determining whether a student watched a video.

Hope that helps.

Landmark_Coll
Community Participant

@James Hope that helps? Dude, that's phenomenal. I recall being specifically told somewhere that there was no API for Studio. I'm ecstatic about this...especially the captioning routines you've worked out. Rolling up my sleeves now...

 

Thank you.

KatieDatko
Community Explorer
Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
Status changed to: Archived
Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.