Panopto allows creators to edit their recordings. This post looks at the most common editing tasks you are likely to want to do. 

Trimming

Sometimes you might want to tidy up the beginning or end of a lecture recording. For example, you may have started the recording but there is a delay as people arrive. It is easy and quick to trim a recording in Panopto.

Find your recording and hover over it to click on Edit.

On the timeline under the video, drag the black line to shade out the portion you want to cut. You can trim the beginning, the end, or a section at any point in the recording.

When you have made your edits click the Apply button at the top.

The recording will then be re-processed with your edits, so will be temporarily unavailable to view.

One of the great features of Panopto is that editing is non-destructive – your cuts are hidden from viewers but you can go back and change them, or even use the Revert button to return your recording to its original state.

This guide from Panopto has a video showing How to Trim a Video in the Editor and detailed step-by-step instructions.

Oops! I forgot to resume after pausing!

Being able to pause a recording is useful, for example when there is a break in the lecture or student activities happening. The keyboard shortcut F9 will pause or resume recording. But once a recording is paused it is easy to forget to resume recording – fortunately that is easily fixed in Panopto.

As with trimming a recording, you can use the Edit tools to take out a paused section. The pause will show as greyed out on the timeline and you can drag the edit line to reduce the length of the pause.

Renaming

When starting a recording at the beginning of a lecture you may not want to spend time giving it a nice title. By default your recording will be identified by the date and time of the recording, but you can change that later.

You can do this when you are making edits, by clicking on the name of the recording at the top of the screen and typing in your changes, then Enter or Return on your keyboard.

Alternatively, if you only want to edit the title you can do that from Settings. You will see the name of the recording and an Edit button. This Panopto guide shows How to Change the Name of a Video in both ways.

Add Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) captions

One of the options in the editing screen is adding captions. Panopto creates captions automatically using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and these can be easily added to a recording.

Please note that the ASR captions will not be available immediately after a recording has processed. Videos up to 1 hour long should have captions ready in 8 hours, but captions for longer recordings will take up to a day.

ASR captions are not 100% accurate as their primary purpose is to support the search function, but they are probably equivalent to the auto-captioning you see on some news programmes. The ASR captions can be edited if required. This guide from Panopto shows the steps to Adding ASR captions.

Editing streams

When you start your recording you select the sources to be recorded. When the recording is processed, these sources appear as editable streams. The video and audio sources are combined into the Primary stream (P1), any secondary sources such as the main screen or additional cameras have a stream each (S1, S2) and if you have added PowerPoint that will be SL.

You can edit all the streams at once, one or more secondary streams independently, delete PowerPoint slides or add new material. The Panopto guide on How to Edit and Add Streams in the Editor will take you through how to do that.

If you have any queries about editing Panopto recordings or would like to discuss how you might use Panopto to enhance your students’ learning please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk.