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Pause Button That Pauses the Recording Instead of Recording an Edited-Out Section in the Background
Gordon Palmer
Crackerjack
Our clients are encouraged to avoid using the pause button because of the fact that it continues to record and creates an edited out section that can later be reverted, instead of actually pausing the recording. We have to instruct everyone regarding this, because someone unaware of this feature who logically thinks that hitting the pause button means the recording has paused, is at risk of recording private conversations or content they don't recorded.
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When pausing while recording a video, the video continues to record (while audio is being paused). Afterwards, you will need to delete the excess video that was recorded while the audio is paused. We are wanting the audio and video to both be paused.
@Pauline Cooper, are you referring to the pause feature in the standard downloaded recorder? In my experience, this button does pause both audio and video, but that footage and audio is still captured. The pause button hides the paused section from playback. That footage can be recovered if the instructor accidentally forgot to resume recording, which has happened and it has been great to still have access to this recorded footage. I have not experienced any disconnect in the pausing, so I might check with support about this issue. I hope that this helps!
So TBH we've realised that in the situations where Panopto is being used you have to assume that it's likely that you're going to get recorded anyway - if you're in a situation where privacy is of key concern I would use a different environment and tool to start with.
Also muting mics is an option to mitigate since even if you did stop the recording what's to say the student(s) aren't making their own recordings?
Thanks Sacha. I'm just thinking in terms of the general public who see a pause button and assume they're pausing. If it's labeled a pause button and they pause because of sensitive information, or the phone rings and they need to pause, they are unaware the recording is still taking place because it's labeled pause. I would suggest a different name if not a different function. Regardless, thanks for the response!
I agree about the distinction of what pause says vs what pause does - tricky one to resolve in the short term I imagine - some people like the idea of being able to 'unerase' since they often pause the recording and then forget to un-pause!
Not sure what the best solution is here since there are pros and cons to both destructive and non-destructive mechanisms here, other than to point this out during any guidance and training - to be fair Panopto themselves do point this out in the tutorial ( https://support.panopto.com/s/article/basic-recording-1#hTargetInstance5) - it might be worth rewording it such to make it clearer possibly?
Yes - this is exactly what I was referring to in one of my requests - glad this has already been captured and is under consideration!
Pause Button That Pauses the Recording Instead of Recording an Edited-Out Section in the Background
Gordon Palmer Tyro February 19
Our clients are encouraged to avoid using the pause button because of the fact that it continues to record and creates an edited out section that can later be reverted, instead of actually pausing the recording. We have to instruct everyone regarding this, because someone unaware of this feature who logically thinks that hitting the pause button means the recording has paused, is at risk of recording private conversations or content they don't recorded.
Tagged: Recording ClientsFeature Requests
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Under consideration · Last Updated March 26
@Stacy Cohen it looks like this was captured in a request back in February - I did not capture the request as detailed, but this post is what we are needing too. It looks to be under consideration, so that is awesome.
Thanks Sacha. I definitely point it out during training.
In my experience, most of my users like the idea that a 'paused' section can be recovered if necessary. The non-destructive editing is also a big hit for users who are first starting out and nervous about making mistakes.
I agree with Sacha that potentially a re-name of this button would iron out any confusion (for users who haven't engaged with any training). In our training we describe 'Pause' as actually meaning 'Hide'.
Perhaps an option to permanently delete hidden/paused sections would be the best of both worlds?
Ultimately the issue with this is that the Panopto mechanics are non-destructive, i.e. you have a recording from which you create an 'edited' copy which sits somewhere else, any re-edits reference that original master - to do a true destructive recording would add another layer into the mechanism since you're now also having to replace the master too.
One of the reasons I suspect why the 'remove video from primary AV recording' still hasn't happened since that's destructive too.
More code, more bugs, less simple/easy to use.
If anything I'd suggest having a 'Freeze edits' option to do the above with appropriate warnings.
@Gemma Witton, I agree with you 100%. I had wished that I could permanently remove the hidden section before, so that is a great suggestion. I generally find that the hidden material does not impact our users at all; if they never receive training, they usually never find the hidden portions of their videos if paused was used. For that reason, I would hesitate against renaming that button. But having the choice when editing to permanently remove hidden sections (to truly "cut") would be valuable.
I would +1 the addition of a feature in the editor to "Lock In" edits made. I think that would be a generally great addition. We use the "drop-folder" human caption workflows quite a bit here, and having a way for users to easily take a standalone clip out of a session without downloading and reuploading everything would be a welcome feature. Not to mention the money saved when people forget that when they send off captions through the folder that the original video goes off to the vendor.
Back to the requested feature, in my mind, if there are conversations going on in a meeting that cannot be recorded at all, then the meeting should not be recorded at all.
Users could tackle this by using the "Resume" function in the recorder as it exists today, and I think that is a perfect solution. It will stop the recorder, they can close the recorder even, and then they can have the confidence that nothing they said was captured (by Panopto) because they have to actually go back in and resume recording and when they land in the editor it has separate video tracks. (https://support.panopto.com/s/article/basic-recording-1#hTargetInstance7)
The majority of our users know what that button does, and it works. I would hate to add a new button and reused the "Pause" name and break workflows that are already established.
If I had a user that needed a workflow like this, the above "resume" function is how I would advise them.
I agree with the challenges behind the Pause functionality and the concerns with regards to unintended things being recorded while "thinking" that Panopto has paused. It is not known to the user that this is the intended functionality, and I am also thinking about scenarios where a video may be "shared" with another creator. The other creator won't know that the edited section was in fact a "paused" recording, and may watch a section that wasn't intended for anyone to watch in the first place.
Gordon, thank you for posting this feature request. I'm glad that someone else already thought to post this and that I found it to support.
I'm one of the administrators for Panopto at my school and only happened to encounter this behavior and learned this function of the "pause" button earlier this year. A few weeks ago, a passing comment during an Advanced Training Webinar was the first time I'd encountered an official acknowledgement of this since using Panopto starting in 2017. I'm glad to see that official Panopto documentation mentions it, but at my school, we've designed our own documentation that better reflects our particular workflows that are integrated with our particular LMS.
I'm absolutely against this behavior of the "pause" button on the principle that in its current presentation within the recorder's interface, combined with the common, reasonable expectation of the average user, the "pause" button is misleading and facilitates a breach of privacy. As an administrator and member of the school's media team, I occasionally edit instructors' recordings to prepare course media and have encountered moments unwittingly recorded while instructors thought it was paused—as anyone would believe at face value. Some of these moments were quite personal in nature, while another meant that several hours passed before the instructor returned home and resumed recording, then later had to upload a recording that is longer than six or so hours.
Oh, so someone clicks "pause" but forgets to click "resume"? That's a mistake to learn from, and we can allow environments in which users can have practice runs to test things like that and learn to avoid mistakes, like setting up practice assignments through which students first use Panopto or having training sessions with instructors. Oh, so Panopto is coded so this behavior is easier to keep than change and possibly require an overhaul? OK, and thanks for all the engineering to make a versatile, growing tool like Panopto possible, but something has to change, and a mistake was made somewhere along the way, in my opinion.
Pausing a recording should mean pausing recording, though, and people shouldn't be uploading private moments for others like administrators to encounter, whether intentional on either side or not. Thousands of customers should not be misled by a seemingly innocuous button that is reasonably expected to do one thing but does another, with consequences for privacy. Perhaps the solution will be as simple as a pop-up warning about the button's actual behavior. Or not.
Thanks for the input Peter, especially about privacy. That's still my biggest concern. We stress this in trainings, but there will always be someone who sees pause and thinks pause, which is the logical thing to think, since pause means pause in the rest of the known world to my knowledge. To your other great point, a six-hour recording is another cost. We continue to make users aware as best we can in the meantime. I love your idea of a pop-up caution so that everyone sees it and is aware. Short of a change in the button name, that would at least provide awareness to all users and hopefully prevent privacy and other issues from occurring.
I noticed in doing some testing recently (running recorder version 9.0.3 on this specific computer) that the recorder now pops up a tip when the pause function is active to let the user know that streams are still being captured, but they are automatically cut from the recording.
I think from here, the only thing left to do is get word out about the resume recording workflow (for when people want to stop recording completely) and we are golden. I guess maybe a new feature to "lock in" edits would be good, but that is another feature request.
Thanks Michael. I just tested the mac recorder 10.2, which does not give the pop-up tip. Is your 9.0.3 a pc version or a remote recorder? The only thing I noticed was the "Recording" time counter changed to "Paused" with the counter continuing, then back to "Recording" with the counter continuing.
@Gordon Palmer I am indeed on a PC
Hello, Michael, and thank you for offering insight to that new notification in Panopto for Windows. It's an improvement, though I want to check out the precise wording sometime to see if it describes the "pause" button's ramifications clearly enough.
"I think from here, the only thing left to do is get word out about the resume recording workflow (for when people want to stop recording completely) and we are golden."
With a sufficiently descriptive warning triggered by use of the "pause" button (letting the user know that anyone who can edit the session can watch the moments recorded while paused), yes, letting users know about this as we can would be fine with me. Without such a warning for all instances of Panopto's recorder at present, though, I really don't think relying on us to get the word out is enough.
I don't have a Windows PC handy and will ask a co-worker sometime to take a screenshot of this new notification when I can, but if you provide a screenshot here for us all, I'd appreciate it. In either case, have a good weekend.
Good afternoon,
I (and most of the user base on our campus) record with PC's so I am certainly less familiar and test less with the macOS client, but I do completely agree that this notification (and functionality) needs to be consistent across platforms. If I can do something on the PC client, I should be able to do the exact same thing, following the exact same steps on macOS (well maybe the permission approval stuff is outside of this).
I think maybe something that could bolster the use of the "resume" function instead of the pause function when that is more appropriate could be a resume button on the window that includes the "Delete and record again" option after you stop recording. You would then have the opportunity to stop recording, either delete what you had recorded, resume recording quickly, or upload to the server.
As far as messaging, I think that if Panopto amends that pop up after you stop to include a resume option there should be another line in the toast notification when a pause happens to say something along the lines of "Any part of this section can be recovered from the Panopto Editor after you finish recording. If you wish to stop capturing completely, please stop recording and resume the recording session when you are ready."
Here is the notification that I have come up in Windows with v.8.0 (now on my office computer that hasn't been used in a while):
It would be wonderful if one were able to pause a recording with webcast, just as one can pause any other recording. The inability to do this is terribly inconvenient in a class in which a break is taken. Even if the webcast simply displayed "the webcast has been paused" and the casting carried on, but without audio or video, it would be very helpful.
Many thanks,
Ben
The pause button in the panopto recorder is not "pausing" the recording and this is a real problem for confidential reasons. Actually, many users are not aware that the recording continues and we have confidential conversations recorded on the cloud. We would really appreciate that you change this, and that the pause button really puts the recorder in standby modus (no recording of any audio/image during the time the pause button is activated). Thank you!
It is a feature that we would very much hate to see removed, and which will seriously degrade the product in our eyes. It has saved our teachers many times when they have pressed pause and forgotten to unpause. Our teachers are incredibly happy with it, and have gotten used to non-destructive recording and editing.
If you are having a confidential conversation, why don't you just stop the recording and continue recording when you are ready: https://support.panopto.com/s/article/How-to-Resume-Recording-to-a-Video
Sorry, but our teachers think that when you press "pause" it stops recording. Actually, when our teachers are recording courses at their office, at home and they get a phone call the automatic reaction is to press the pause button, answer the phone call , and retake the recording once the phone call is finished. So there are many situations where we get confidential conversations recorded on the cloud ! Also in the amphitheatre, sometimes when there is a break during a course, teachers press "pause" and start to talk with a student on more personal things while waiting to start again the class. Believe me, it is a major problem for us. Our teachers are shocked when they understand that "pause" finally means it continues recording.
This is a critical feature for us. Getting rid of it would require a lot of retraining, and would ultimately result in avoidably lost content for us. This feature has saved some major lectures on our campus over the years.
When recording using the desktop app, if an individual needs to have a confidential conversation and they don't want that to be captured at all, they should be stopping the recording and use the "Resume Recording" feature to pick up recording again:
In the recording app, it is already quite clear that content is still being captured but will be cut in the editor automatically:
I do think there should be an option to destructively edit a video to accommodate situations where something was captured that maybe should've been omitted, but that is another feature request:
We have always seen this as a feature rather than a bug. Like the other comments on this post I believe this would be a degradation if the functionality was altered.
When we work with our teaching staff, we make it clear to them how this operates and the rationale for it. We link it to how the non-destructive editing works when you want to cut something from à recording.
I wonder if your staff might buy into it more if you frame this as something that can be beneficial, and provide some info on how it works?
Because there are so many in favor of both sides, could this be an institutional setting, or better, a departmental setting, so that each group could choose what best fits their need? At our School of Medicine, we are still very much in favor of the pause button not recording while paused because of security and privacy issues. However, the groups that need this feature to prevent content loss are many. As it is, we all have only one option. Making this a setting would resolve many of the problems.
…or a preference or configuration setting on the recorders.