Studio Capture is released: Try Our New Lightweight Screen Recorder!

[AkosFarago]

If this is the first time you hear about this then I suggest you head to my September post on Announcing a New Screen Recorder in Studio for a deeper understanding on why we committed ourselves to our own screen capture solution besides Screencast-O-Matic. Furthermore, there is an important detail to take note of:

Studio Capture is in Beta mode. It means that we highly recommend you to experiment with it, share your feedback, improvement ideas or issues you may experience. The most important limitations are that it is only supported on Chrome and Edge browsers, and that it is currently optimized for Full-HD recordings, with a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. It performs best when your screen matches or is below this resolution. If your screen has a higher resolution, you may experience performance issues during recording or a decrease in the video quality.

In addition to that, we are continuously going to enhance the recorder: stability and performance will be our top priority in this beta period however, recovering videos due to sudden browser crash or network interrupt is already supported in this version. Certain features are also planned but we're especially interested in hearing from you about potential valuable additions. 

Our second goal with the new lightweight recorder was adding back to back support as this was a burning need for longer recordings such as consecutive lectures. Our recommendation is to confirm that the solution does not have performance or quality issues for short, few minutes long one videos on a device before committing to recording a longer lecture. You will also notice that there is no limit on the recording length. Our extensive testing indicates that if the device successfully runs the recording for a few minutes then it won’t have issues with significantly longer ones either however, we will keep a close eye on this and it might even change in the future.

Furthermore, I already got questions about our plans with Screencast-O-Matic. Please be assured that there are no intentions to discontinue its support. Studio Capture should give you a lightweight alternative with back to back support (psst, SpeedGrader will also leverage this soon!) and continuous development. For more details, I highly recommend you to start with the guides. 

Do not hesitate to comment or DM me if you have a question!

Best,

Akos

[dbrace]

Looking forward to using this @AkosFarago!

Just wanted to check something, since they are popular. Based on the Full-HD and 1920 X 1080 references that you mentioned, does this mean that the new/beta "Studio Capture" option will not work with the built-in screens for Apple desktops and laptops or that the experience will not be as good as on an external display/monitor?

[AkosFarago]

Hi @dbrace,

it does work on any resolution, it is that you may notice a certain degree of quality degradation as the e.g. Retina Display resolution is scaled down to Full-HD. I strongly recommend you to experiment with it and see whether the results are satisfactory on those high-res screens or not.  

[snugent]

I just did a couple of test recordings and here are my first look thoughts. 

I love that picture in picture works on our thin clients! We've been having issues with Screen-O-matic with the picture in picture as it would not display even through when we did a web cam video it worked fine.  

However, on the picture in picture, the image displays in lower right and playbar overlays it unless you go full screen mode. it would be nice to have the placement of the picture in picture in a different location or have the playbar moved down so it doesn't hide video content. 

On setting up a recording, the first time I selected a browser tab. I was a bit confused since I didn't see a button to start recording. What I didn't realize was that I had to go back to the Studio tab to begin the recording. I think this will confuse people. It would be nice to have some controls on tab or window you plan to record. 

Thank You for including options to save a video! I can't tell you how many times video content has been lost with the old system. 

[DaGIFT222]

@snugent I can't wait to test out these new features.

GIFT

[AkosFarago]

Hi @snugent,

Thank you so much for your feedback! I have some good news

• We are already working on a better picture-in-picture solution where the webcam stream can be repositioned if that covers valuable part of the screen. Stay tuned!
• The tab change upon sharing the screen is a strange default browser behaviour when recording the tab. However, chromium based browsers so-called experimental options to change this behaviour and we will release that on Feb 19th! 

[robertlbishop]

Are there plans to roll this out to other browsers?

[AkosFarago]

@robertlbishop, is there any specific browser you have in mind? Firefox and Safari might be later added however, not planned at the moment. 

[Lucas-Clontz]

@AkosFarago If I may ask what are all the supported browsers I can use this on and is Chrome one of them?

[murphym]

Enjoying the browser-based recording possibility and am looking forward to when this feature is enabled for SpeedGrader feedback as well.

I came across an issue when doing some testing. I have 2 monitors with one in landscape and one in vertical orientation. If I select the entire landscape screen, it squishes the landscape display into a vertical orientation as shown:

If I turn off the webcam option, the screen share returns to the normal landscape orientation.

Looking forward to seeing this fixed as I would like to use this feature more.

[dbrace]

@Lucas-Clontz, it was mentioned by @AkosFarago in the blog post that Chrome and Edge web browsers are supported.

[CarolynCardwell]

Having this work in both Firefox and Safari is important to us.  Our institution-provided PC laptops come with Firefox and Edge, but most faculty use Firefox.  Those who choose to use their own Macs are naturally going to use Safari. 

[joe_fahs]

Studio Screen Capture Comments

Using both Edge and Chrome for Mac:

When a recording is initiated (Start Recording), the Studio Capture window minimizes into a recording bar at the top of the Studio Library page. That may be hard to find for new users. It also requires switching between the Studio tab and other tabs when recording a browser window with multiple tabs or recording a dedicated tab.

When recording a window such as a PowerPoint presentation, the webcam video does not display. That may be a limitation of a browser based solution, although not seeing the video during recording is a bit disconcerting.

Is there a timeline when annotation/markup tools will be available with the Studio Capture screen recordings?

So far, Studio Screen Capture is fast, responsive and reliable, although I have not yet tested recordings longer than five minutes.

Brave is a Chromium browser like Edge. It would be awesome if Canvas would support Brave so it works with new Studio Capture tool.

[AkosFarago]

@murphym, thank you for reporting this behaviour, I will open a ticket to team to take a look at it!

@CarolynCardwell, we understand the need for Firefox/Safari and will make the leap towards supporting those browsers in the future. However, at the moment the advantage coming from limiting this to Chrome and Edge browsers only significantly accelerates our development.

@joe_fahs thank you for the feedback, same tab recording and not navigating away when the same tap is being recorded should be fixed by now. Furthermore, the team is currently looking into our options with a separate webcam stream solution so that it can be displayed during recording. Brave support is also investigated. We hope to have another release latest in April with some of these improvements!

[dbrace]

Hi @AkosFarago!

According to Canvas Release Notes (2024-03-16) (in Beta) the SpeedGrader was supposed to have received an update on 2024-02-21 for recording media comments.

I understand that these two releases are separate from each other but you mentioned SpeedGrader updates in this post and in previous posts.

Are you able to tell us when SpeedGrader will receive the media comment release (in Beta)?

[AkosFarago]

Hi @dbrace ,

Thank you for pointing it out. The Speedgrader integration was somewhat mistakenly mentioned in the 03-16 release notes, it will hit beta in the following release. We apologize for the confusion.

[Jeff_F]

@AkosFarago  - I've been using screen capture video recordings of my feedback for a decade. Back in 2017 the idea to have a SpeedGrader integration  was identified as a desired feature during the Project Khaki meet up. So I am excited this is soon to become a reality.

And just today I received this unsolicited feedback from a current student:

Mr. F., I appreciate the feedback! I just wanted to say the video responses are awesome, they're very helpful for visualizing everything!

[Hildi_Pardo]

Hi @AkosFarago  -- I'm just seeing this blog post.

How does this blog post relate (or not) to this one?  https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/The-Product-Blog/Studio-s-Screen-Recorder-Gets-64-bit-Version-Upg...

My district hasn't done this version upgrade yet.   Do we still need it?

Is the Lightweight recorder something completely different?

Thanks in advance for helping clear this up for me!

[AkosFarago]

Hi @Hildi_Pardo ,

This post doesn't relate to the Screencast-o-matic upgrade whatsoever, the new Screen Capture solution is an entirely different solution.

Best

[Hildi_Pardo]

Ok, thanks!  So we should still plan on adding the upgrade, correct?  Thanks for your patience!

[AkosFarago]

@Hildi_Pardo that is correct! 

[AkosFarago]

@joe_fahs Brave support will be added on Monday.

Regarding the Speedgrader integration, that is now available on Canvas beta, however, will only hit production in May unfortunately due to some bugs the team could not foresee.

[murphym]

Thanks for the update @AkosFarago. I checked yesterday on our Beta install and was able to see the ScreenCapture solution visible in SpeedGrader in the Chrome browser. This morning it is not visible on Edge.

I was checking again this morning in a different browser as in my brief test yesterday the functionality was not at all as expected. In particular, while I was able to utilize ScreenCapture, I was unable to use any of the annotation features in Speedgrader as the ScreenCapture tool took focus of the browser tab I was trying to record. This means I would have to have 2 separate tabs open while grading, one for ScreenCapture and one for Speedgrader. I fear this could cause an issue where I leave video feedback on the wrong student's submission.

Is the removal of the ScreenCapture tool in SpeedGrader on Beta related to this issue?

Thanks,

Morgan

[mbmacdonald]

I was able to see the Screen Capture in SpeedGrader in beta last week. Now I can't. Tried Chrome and FF. I agree with some of the functionality issues mentioned by @murphym 

[cgreeley]

@AkosFarago I keep getting an error that says I need to check system preferences to enable full screen recording so that I can utilize the webcam as well. I've changed the system preferences on my Mac and Screen Recording settings, but still no luck. Thoughts? Help? Thank you!

[AkosFarago]

 @cgreeley we have not pushed any updates recently on this, so I am not sure what makes this behaviour in your environment. Please reach out to support, they should be able to help out!