Forum Discussion
Can I change a thumbnail on a video?
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?
Hi Steve!
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us.
We currently have this logged as a feature request, so I’ll go ahead and include your voice. We’ll update this discussion if this feature makes it on our feature roadmap.
Hi Luciana,
Is there a solution to this? I've been facing the exact same issue right now.
Same issue to the topic I also found here:
2018
Thumbnail selection in Rise videos - Rise 360 Discussions - E-Learning Heroes (articulate.com)
2019
Can I change a thumbnail on a video? - Rise 360 Discussions - E-Learning Heroes (articulate.com)
2021
Rise changing color of MP4 videos - Rise 360 Discussions - E-Learning Heroes (articulate.com)
2022
Video thumbnail oddly pixelated and discolored - Rise 360 Discussions - E-Learning Heroes (articulate.com)
2022
Video preview looks grainy - Rise 360 Discussions - E-Learning Heroes (articulate.com)Hi Levon,
They still haven't put in a feature on Rise to change video thumbnails. From my own experiencing uploading videos into Rise, Rise takes the 1st frame as the thumbnail. If your video sequence starts with a solid black frame, then the thumbnail on Rise will be solid black. The only workaround I know of, and use, is the following:
- In whatever video editing/creation software you use, move everything one (1) frame to the right. Effectively, your whole sequence starts at frame 1.
- Generate the thumbnail you want to use. I use Premiere Pro's export frame function to image and import that into my project.
- Place the thumbnail onto your timeline and trim it to be 1 frame.
- Put this 1 frame long image at the very start of the timeline, before everything else.
- Export your video.
When you upload this to Rise, Rise will take the first frame of the video as the thumbnail to display.
Hope that helps.
Kind regards.
Hi Sam,
thanks for this perfectly written explanation. I am doing it exact the way you explained it. But then the second problem appears:
Video thumbnail oddly pixelated and discolored - Rise 360 Discussions - E-Learning Heroes (articulate.com)
... nothing to add here. Exactly this is my Problem at the moment.Even the Workaround is not Working. But the Videos from Rise itself have a crystal clear thumbnail - But how?
Hi Levon,
I've never had a problem with pixellated video content or thumbnails on Rise myself. By the sounds of it, if you're getting the correct image as your thumbnail, then that's half of the issue solved. Next is figuring out the cause behind this issue with pixellation.
Couple of things to look at if you haven't already:
- What resolution are your videos and thumbnail image?
- Low resolutions will run into this problem where they're being scaled up to fill the player window and there isn't enough pixels in the video to fill it properly. I'd avoid doing videos less than FHD (1920 x 1080 pixels) myself.
- HD (720p) can be useable, but you'll run into the pixellation issue far more often than with FHD content.
- What's the aspect ratio of the video/s?
- If you're using an aspect ratio other than 16:9, you might be running into the issue as noted above where it's being stretched in either or both x and y to fill the player window.
Kind regards.
- What resolution are your videos and thumbnail image?
Please allow us to pick a thumbnail image for videos in Rise. This is very frustrating! :(
The best workaround I've found is to replace the automatically generated thumbnail with your own image. After downloading your scorm package, you'll find inside the assets folder the video with your filename along with a .jpg file with the same filename as your video- this the thumbnail. I demonstrate how to replace this easily by exporting an image of your design from Adobe XD, see this other thread. I also do a deep dive into why the thumbnail's color is all screwy yet not everyone seems to experience this 'error' the thumbnail seems be generating a gif/png file with an indexed color mode, yet is being named as a jpg (should be RGB color mode). This is a good way to get unexpected color results across devices and operating systems.
Please take me off this thread.
Carol Valcu
Senior Learning Experience Designer
Financial Management Services
Stanford University
Tel: 650-725-0324
fingate.stanford.eduI think you can do this by clicking Unsubscribe, at the top of the discussion on the website.
Just want to echo sentiments above. Still very much needed!
Has there been an update to this? It's crazy that this request was made YEARS ago and yet still no resolution. I am uploading videos that show black screen with white play button. We really need the ability to upload a thumbnail.
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!
SteveHi 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.
Hi Lara, unfortunately this is the only option right now.
And I wouldn't wait for a solution to this because AFAIK it's not even on their roadmap...Yep, I understand. It's a shame we can't get small UX fixes like this done in a timely manner.
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?
