Slice and dice your recordings with Echo360

If you have ever used Echo360’s video editor and found its features lacking, there’s good news with several editor improvements available now and lined up for the near future. 

Here’s what’s new:

• Set a customised thumbnail image for the video
• Insert another video into your video
• Trim the start and end of the video
• Easily delete a segment of the video

Access the video editor

To access the video editor, click the Echo360 link from any iLearn unit then choose the Library tab. Choose a video listed in your library. 

Choose Edit Media to open the video editor. 

Set Thumbnail 

You can now set a thumbnail to become the video’s poster image whenever it listed and initially displayed to students. 

To use a frame from the video, place the marker to a location in the timeline where the desired image is displayed. From the marker menu choose Set Thumbnail.

From the dialogue choose the option for Video 1, check the preview and choose Set Thumbnail. 

If your video contains two video sources such as separate screen-display and webcam, you can choose between either Video 1 or Video 2 for the thumbnail source. 

You can also set a thumbnail from an image that is not contained in the video. In that case choose Custom Image from the dialogue above and browse for any image. You can also use the Custom Image option to upload a thumbnail image for audio-only recordings. 

If you are just setting a thumbnail and are not editing the video itself, the thumbnail is updated immediately without the need click save in the editor. 

Please note that due to a technical limitation, setting a thumbnail from a video frame is not possible using the Safari browser on Mac and only setting a custom image is possible. 

Here is a detailed guide covering Setting a Thumbnail. 

Insert Video 

You can now insert another video from your Echo360 library. This is useful for: 

• Updating a past video with a new introduction or information. 
• Combining videos taken from different sources, such as interspersing videos of practical demonstration within a lecture recording. 
• Recording a lecture in multiple sittings then joining them together before sharing with students. 

While editing a video, simply choose a location in the timeline and from the marker menu icon choose Insert Clip. You can browse for any video (or audio) in your Echo360 library to insert. 

You can insert as many other videos as you want in any location, and you can com bine single source with dual source videos, and audio only recordings.

Here is a detailed guide covering inserting video. 

Trim start and end 

To trim the start, place the marker to the desired location and choose the trim-in icon. 

To trim the end, place the marker to the desired location and choose the trim-out icon. 

Delete Segment 

Place the marker at the start of segment and from the marker menu choose Split Clip. 

Then place the marker at the end of the segment you want to delete and again choose Split Clip. 

While the segment is bound by the pink rectangle, choose the Delete icon from the menu. 

Here are two guides covering trimming start and end and Remove segments. 

Saving Edits 

After making any edits you can either Save which will overwrite the original video, or Save As which creates a copy of the edited video in your Echo360 library. 

One final tip; you can use the ‘Save As’ function to effectively breakup a longer recording into smaller parts for sharing. For example, you could trim and segment the long recording down to the first concept and use the ‘Save As’ function to separate the covered concept into its own video. Then return to editing the original recording and trim down to the next concept and ‘Save As’ another video, and so on. You could then embed each concise video into the relevant sections of the unit in iLearn. 

Find Out More 

Guides for using Echo360 are located here. For any assistance with Echo360 please email ilearn.help@mq.edu.au.