Can I change a thumbnail on a video?

Jul 30, 2019

Right now it is showing a black screen, is there a way to add a thumbnail image from my video as the cover instead of a black screen?

 

158 Replies
Steve Warren

Hi Lara

It's my belief that Rise is an unbelievably good tool that makes creating responsive courses (almost) a joy.

But it's full of big irritations, like this, which are never attended to (yes, they have a "roadmap", but hey ho, don't hold your breath).  I can only guess that they find the idea of working on new innovations more interesting, than the toil involved in improving the UX.

The only way to do this is to come up with workarounds.  And there are many people out there whose Rise courses are littered with them -- for a much better result.
It's just the way it is.

I have my own solution, and that's to embed the videos which are hosted externally (Streaming Video Provider, since you ask) and I can do what I like without worrying about the lack of functionality in Rise (and the *awful* compression!!!)

But the easiest way to get around it is the one proposed by several people, and that's to create your video with the thumbnail as your first frame.  Hey presto, problem solved :)

Good luck with what you do!
Steve

Lara Skaggs

Hi Steve, thanks for your response. Unfortunately, I cannot embed from an outside source like Vimeo since our courses need to be downloaded onto a device for offline use. This leaves us with no other option than to directly upload our videos. We have hundreds of videos and now have to edit each one to have the first frame be a thumbnail. While yes, this does work, it puts a large amount of work on us that could be solved by the simple ability to upload a thumbnail through Rise.

Algebra University  eLearning production

Oh, come on Articulate, this is ridiculous! You will implement AI, but will not implement thumbnail image!? Videos that has fade-in will appear black until user plays the video. These look awful, really. Adding an image to the frist frame of the video is not a joke, just try to google it how complicate it is without re-encoding and loosing quality. Yes, I know there is ffmpeg, but how many people will successfully read and set all necessary video parameters?