Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Share video with students
Page last updated:
This guide contains information for staff about sharing video with students.
If you have a video file saved on your device and you want to share it with your students, we recommend uploading the video to the Panopto content area in the relevant MyBeckett module. Step by step instructions are provided in our guide to using Panopto for your module for lecture recordings and videos.
- If you have a video saved on your PC/Mac, upload to Panopto Replay and share via a module
- If you have a Stream recording to share in MyBeckett you can either download it to your PC/Mac and upload to Panopto (above) or change the video permissions in Stream - see below:
- Changing Viewing Access in Stream Include your entire school, and embed in your module as an item.
- If using Collaborate all videos will automatically be stored in the module and accessed via the Collaborate Ultra meeting link. There is no need to re-upload, but you may choose to share a link to the recording elsewhere in the module if need be.
- If Sharing a Collaborate recording link to other modules follow this guide, you will need to ensure you to select the public access setting otherwise it will not be viewable.
If you need further advice about an appropriate method, please contact Digital Learning Service Team: digitallearning@leedsbeckett.ac.uk / 0113 812 5410.
The problem
It is possible, and deceptively simple, to embed an uploaded video file into a MyBeckett item. However, this is intended to be used ONLY with specially prepared video files that are short in duration and are formatted correctly for web delivery. While campus learning has been suspended for most students, there has been an explosion in the number of massive video files shared in this way, many of which are not in ideal formats for online viewing.
As a result, the user experience related to watching these videos is deteriorating for students - e.g. lengthy video download times, students being unable to view a particular file or compression type. In addition, system costs threaten to increase significantly. There are many alternative and superior ways to share video available to course teams and it’s vital that course teams share video in MyBeckett via recommended methods.
The solution
This in-a-nutshell recommendation applies to the most common scenario, you have video file saved on your device and you want your students to be able to find and view it by navigating a MyBeckett module
Recommended approach:
- Set up the Panopto content area in your MyBeckett module.
- Upload your video into the Panopto content area.
- Your students can then view lists of videos in the Panopto content area.
Step by step instructions are provided in our guide to using Panopto for your module for lecture recordings and videos.
Optionally, you might also like to make a link to each specific Panopto item within various different content areas.
This section is for the curious who want to understand why sharing video on web sites is so fraught with technical pitfalls. It is not essential reading.
The size of a video file depends on the resolution of each still image, the number of still images shown per second and the duration of the playback. However, the one thing that influences file size much more than any of those factors is the file format used. There are a myriad of different file formats, sub-variants and a confusing number of parameters that can be used to adjust each format.
Generally speaking, video files that are provided to cinemas for commercial presentation are beyond huge. This is because the quality of the images must be near perfect. At the other end of the scale a funny video clip that is attached to a text message in a country that lacks Internet access is likely to be very poor quality but tiny.
Video shared on the web must be formatted carefully in several ways:
- The file has to be small enough (in bytes per second duration) to deliver to the user’s browser within the limits of that user’s Internet speed.
- The file has to be in a format that is recognised and can be played in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and many other browsers, plus on computers, laptops, tablets, mobile phones and any other devices users might have. These capabilities change from year to year – for example, the Flash video format used to be supported by most browsers but is now supported by few.
- The user may want to move playback to any point within the video and start playing immediately. For example, a student may have viewed the first 30 minutes on a previous day and today does not want to wait 30 minutes for the playback to reach the section that they have not yet viewed. The format of the video file affects the ability of a web site to deliver it in this way.
Formatting video appropriately for web delivery is technically complex and significant study is required to master it.
Modern video cameras usually record to digital files that use incredibly high quality settings. Even on low cost consumer cameras the default settings are equivalent to what you might expect for a feature film recorded on a Blu-ray disk. Some use even higher quality settings that are good enough for the production of cinema quality films.
The manufacturers of such cameras expect users to edit and process material from the camera before sharing with other users. You may keep the original highest quality material in an archive but you have lower quality copies in much smaller files for sharing. The file you share might be reduced in size by a factor of 100 with the quality of the image being nearly as good as the original. More likely the size will be reduced by a factor of 1000 or even more reducing the quality noticeably but without spoiling the purpose.
There are very many software systems for processing video. They divide into two broad categories:
Software you install on your desktop computer.
The huge files produced by your camera never leave your own computer. You run the software, open the original file, specify settings and the software saves a new file with suitable compression and settings.
| Pros | Cons |
|
|
Server based systems. (e.g. YouTube or Panopto)
You can upload the huge file from your camera and it will be processed on the server. After some time the video is made available to other users on the web site. It isn’t obviously apparent but the server has created a new file containing a compressed version of your original file. In fact, it may create a number of different versions of your file.
| Pros | Cons |
|
|
Panopto and YouTube are server based systems for processing video and that is why they are recommended for sharing video with students. MyBeckett is a web server that simply serves up whatever file has been uploaded to it and therefore is intended only for files that have already been suitably processed with software on your own computer.
To be clear, MyBeckett does NOT process any video that is uploaded to it. However, MyBeckett fully integrates with Panopto so videos hosted in Panopto can easily be included in course content using links or embedding.
There are many other scenarios for sharing video and we can’t cover them all on this page. However, we have started building a list of links to other advice. This list will grow over time.
