Can I change a thumbnail on a video?

Jul 30, 2019

Brittany Kerr
By Brittany Kerr

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?

 

155 Replies
Levon Trettin
7 months ago10/12/23 at 2:40 pm (UTC)

+10 please - Speaking for me and my Team <3 
How is it possible to not have the Control over the first impression on a video for the learner? I think the importance of the Thumbnail is not to be discussed - E.g. Thumbnails are responsible for the rise and fall of YouTube videos. We need to have the control over this factor.
Thank you :)

Steven Benassi
4 months ago01/22/24 at 1:14 pm (UTC)

Hi Meredith!

Thanks for checking in on this!

I don't have any updates to share at this time as our development team has been prioritizing other features. I've included you in the feature report so you can be notified as soon as we have updates to share!

For your reference, here's a deeper look at how we manage feature requests.

Marc Brown
18 days ago05/01/24 at 2:00 pm (UTC)

I see the staff has been commenting on this request saying it has been added as a feature request within the past 2 months. You do realize that this was requested over 5 years ago right? You may want to reevaluate your request process because this one keeps getting ignored and it has a lot of weight behind it. Any platform that allows videos to be uploaded has the ability to update the thumbnail except yours. This is basic functionality that was ignored by your development team and needs to be added.

Levon Trettin
17 days ago05/02/24 at 12:48 pm (UTC)

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)

Sam Barnard
17 days ago05/02/24 at 12:57 pm (UTC)

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:

  1. In whatever video editing/creation software you use, move everything one (1) frame to the right. Effectively, your whole sequence starts at frame 1.
  2. Generate the thumbnail you want to use. I use Premiere Pro's export frame function to image and import that into my project.
  3. Place the thumbnail onto your timeline and trim it to be 1 frame.
  4. Put this 1 frame long image at the very start of the timeline, before everything else.
  5. 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.

Levon Trettin
17 days ago05/02/24 at 2:07 pm (UTC)

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?

Sam Barnard
17 days ago05/02/24 at 2:23 pm (UTC)

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

Phil Foss
10 days ago05/09/24 at 7:50 pm (UTC)

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.

video thumbnail

 

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