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Ingest and Transform Source Footage

When you compose a video edit you provide URLs to source footage. These URLs can be anywhere on the internet and will be ingested (downloaded) as part of the rendering process.

Source footage may also come from various sources including user generated content (UGC) or stock libraries. This can result in files with different formats, resolutions, aspect ratios, and encoding settings.

Setup, bandwidth, storage and latency issues​

While pulling files from URLs is convenient, this approach comes with a number of disadvantages:

  • Latency due to the file being located in a different geographical region from the Edit API.
  • Latency due to slow server, storage location or network issues.
  • Outgoing bandwidth costs every time the file is requested.
  • The need to setup, maintain and manage your own storage and server.
  • Setting up a system to process customer uploads.
  • Dealing with CORS issues.

The Ingest API solves these issues by providing endpoints to fetch or upload source assets (videos, images, audio and fonts) that can be used in your edit.

Transforming and standardizing source footage​

In addition to solving the issues above, you can also apply transformations to source footage and create renditions which helps solve the following issues:

  • Standardize the resolution, aspect ratio, framerate and quality of source footage from different devices.
  • Re-encode footage from different devices to make it compatible with the Shotstack platform.
  • Crop and resize footage to fit different aspect ratios to allow different creative effects to be applied.
  • Optimize rendering performance by creating renditions that match the output resolution of your edit.