The procedural and technical details have been separated to streamline the documentation surrounding the administrator's capture schedule interface. The information in this article helps administrators and schedulers select options correctly in the Capture Schedule dialog box. The procedures for using the dialog box itself are included in Creating Captures and Capture Schedules. We strongly recommend reviewing the information below before using the capture schedule dialog box to generate single or recurring captures.

Captures, as discussed here, are recordings made by managed capture appliances (Pro, Pod, legacy SCHD, or Universal Capture: Classroom), initiated by an Administrator, and set to occur either as scheduled recordings for a section / folder, scheduled recordings of planned speakers, or as one-off recordings of special events.

Captures can be recorded and published for on-demand playback (VOD) or streamed live. If you plan to live-stream captures, note that an on-demand video will be automatically created from the stream, and the live stream quality will match the selected output quality. Also note that Pro and Pod devices stream at a lower bitrate than the SCHD, which improves the live viewing experience from those devices.

The following table provides a basic guide for selecting capture output quality, particularly as related to the number of users you expect to stream a capture live (number of individual live streams):

Live Streaming Captures

Be aware of the following concerning live-streaming captures:

• Live Stream quality matches the capture output quality. The ability to set Live Stream quality separately has not yet been implemented.
• Captures must be published to one or more sections / folders to be live-streamed; if no sections / folders are listed, the Live stream toggle is unavailable.
• If you have problems streaming Live captures, set the capture output quality to Standard. This will reduce the stream size and bitrate. Additionally, note that both the Pro and Pod devices stream at lower bitrates than SCHD.
• To schedule a live capture, the selected room must contain a managed capture device (legacy SCHD, Pro, Pod, or Universal Capture: Classroom). Live captures for Universal Capture: Personal can only be generated on an ad hoc basis.

Select Sections / Folders for Auto-Publishing Captures

Captures can be set to be automatically published to one or more sections/folders, or created without a target section/folder for publication and published manually later.

Schedulers can create capture schedules that are directly associated with an Org / Department without publishing them to a Section. Based on your institution's settings, this may be required in some cases.

Captures that are not associated with a section / folder have the following limitations:

• You cannot livestream a capture unless it has a section / folder associated with it.
  If you need to set up a live stream outside a particular section/folder (available to a broader audience), create a special events section/folder to publish the Live capture to. Be sure to assign all appropriate users to the section / folder, and configure a shared venue for multiple users to view the stream. See Configuration Requirements for Live for additional information.
• Captures without a section / folder will only appear in the selected Instructor's Library and / or on the Admin's Captures page. Either the Admin or the Instructor must publish the capture to make it viewable to other users.
  Alternatively, an admin or instructor can copy the public link for a completed capture and post it anywhere (with or without authentication). This allows non-section assignees, or even non-EchoVideo users, to view the media and may be an option if publishing does not provide sufficient user access. Admins / Instructors can also embed videos on LMS / VLE pages if the LMS / VLE administrator has turned it on.
• Captures scheduled without sections / folders will not recognize any exclusion dates configured for the term. This is because the capture schedule doesn't have a term to work with unless a section / folder is selected.
• You cannot set Availability / Unavailability unless a section / folder is selected. Availability settings apply only to whether students can view the capture. If the capture is not published to a section / folder, it is not available to students and, therefore, does not require availability settings.

How Term Exclusion Dates Are Enforced

For a recurring capture schedule published to a section / folder, the exclusion dates configured for the section(s) being published are enforced on the schedule. This means that no captures are generated on those dates.

• If no sections / folders are selected, no exclusion dates will be applied. All capture dates are respected and fall within the start / end date range.
• If the schedule is not recurring, the capture will occur on the specified date, even if that date falls on a term exclusion date and the capture is published to a section/folder in that term. EchoVideo assumes the provided date was intentional, since it is a single capture.
• If you publish to multiple sections / folders that reside in different terms (uncommon but possible), the term dates for each section's / folder's term exclusion dates and term start / end date limitations are enforced.

Duration Limitations and Precedence

As with all captures, you must assign a room, and you can select a room only if a device is present in it. Furthermore, the system enforces a maximum duration for any scheduled capture, which depends on the device type (4 hours for SafeCapture HDs and 8 hours for all other capture appliances). For additional details, see Working with Capture Appliances.

Captures are sent for automatic transcription when they are published to a section. With Amazon Web Services, captures longer than 4 hours cannot be automatically transcribed. Live Captions are also limited to a maximum capture duration of 4 hours. For more information, see Automatic Transcriptioning Service or ASR. 

Finally, scheduled captures take precedence over ad hoc captures. This means that any ongoing ad hoc captures will be stopped to allow an administrator-configured scheduled capture to run (regardless of when the schedule was created). This applies to both recurring schedule captures and one-off or non-recurring captures.