In an attempt to streamline the documentation surrounding the administrator's capture schedule interface, the procedural information and the technical details have been separated. The information provided in THIS article is designed to assist administrators and schedulers in properly selecting options 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 you review the below information FIRST, before using the capture schedule dialog box to generate singular or recurring captures.

Captures, as discussed here, are recordings made by Echo360 recording appliances (such as the Echo360 Pro or Pod or the legacy SCHD) or by Universal Capture: Classroom, initiated by an Administrator, and set to occur either as scheduled recordings for a section, 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 are planning to live stream captures, know that an on-demand video will automatically be created from the stream and that the live stream quality will be the SAME as that selected for the capture output. Also know that Pro and Pod devices stream at a lower bitrate than the SCHD, improving 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 with respect to live streaming captures:

• Live Stream quality is the same as capture output quality: The ability to set the Live Stream quality separately has not yet been implemented.
• Captures must be published to one or more sections in order to be live streamed; if no sections are listed, the Live stream toggle is unavailable.
• IF you are having problems streaming Live captures, set the capture output quality to Standard. This will reduce the size and bitrate of the stream. Also, be aware that both the Pro and Pod devices stream lower bitrates than SCHD.
• To schedule a live capture, the selected room must contain an Echo360 capture appliance (legacy SCHD, Pro, or Pod) or Universal Capture: Classroom. Live captures for Universal Capture: Personal can only be generated on an ad hoc basis.

Selecting sections for auto-publishing captures

Captures can be set to be automatically published to one or more sections, or they can be created without target sections for publishing, to be manually published later.

Schedulers can ONLY create capture schedules that are auto-published to sections.

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

• You cannot Live Stream a capture unless it has a section associated with it.
  If you need to set up a live stream for outside of a particular section (available to a wider audience), set up a special events section to publish the Live capture to. Be sure to assign all appropriate users to the section, and possibly configure a shared venue for multiple users to view the stream. See Configuration Requirements for Live for additional information.
• Captures without a section will ONLY appear in the selected Instructor's LIBRARY and/or on the Admin's CAPTURES page. Either the Admin or the Instructor will have to publish the capture to make it viewable by other users.
  ALTERNATELY an admin or an instructor can copy the public link for a completed capture and post it anywhere (with or without authentication required). This allows non-section assignees, or even non-Echo360 users to view the media and may be an option if publishing does not provide sufficient user access. Admins/Instructors can also embed videos into LMS/VLE pages if this capability has been added to the LMS/VLE by the administrator.
• Captures scheduled without sections 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 is selected.
• You cannot set Availability/Unavailability unless a section is selected. Availability settings apply only to whether students can view the capture. If the capture is not published to a section, it is not available to students and therefore does not require availability settings.

How Term exclusion dates are enforced

For a recurring capture schedule being published to a section, the exclusion dates configured for the term of the section(s) being published to ARE enforced for the schedule. Meaning, no captures are generated on those dates.

• If there are no sections selected, there are no exclusion dates to apply. All capture dates within the start/end date given are respected and captured.
• If the schedule is NOT recurring, the capture will happen on the date specified, even if the date falls on a term exclusion date, AND even if it is published to a section in that term. Echo360 assumes the date given was intentional since it is a single capture.
• If you publish to multiple sections that reside in different terms (uncommon but possible), the term dates for each section's term is enforced with respect to exclusion dates and term start/end date limitations.

Duration Limitations and Precedence

As with all captures, you must identify a room for the capture, and you can only select a room if there is a device in the room. Furthermore, the maximum duration of any scheduled capture is enforced by the system and is dependent on the TYPE of device being used (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. However, note the following about automated transcription of captures:

• If Amazon is your transcript provider, captures longer than 4 hours CANNOT be automatically transcribed. 
• If Speechmatics is your transcript provider, the maximum file size for the audio file is roughly 2GB. However that would be a recording of almost 14 hours, which greatly exceeds the device limit.

If you are not sure who your transcript provider is, contact your Echo360 representative, or support@echo360.com. See also Automatic Transcriptioning Service or ASR for more information.

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