Speed improvements, large file support and caching upgrades

Over the last few months, we’ve been rolling out major infrastructure upgrades to the Shotstack platform to help our customers create longer, higher resolution videos and work with large source footage.

Our latest release increases render speeds, handles longer videos and larger file sizes, and optimises asset ingestion performance.

2x Render Speeds

Videos now render up to two times faster than our original infrastructure thanks to recent hardware improvements. This speed increase is now available to all customers at no extra charge. You do not need to make any changes to take advantage of this upgrade.

1 minute video rendering benchmark

Speed increase benchmark

One minute before and after render speed benchmark for the following sample video created using the following JSON.

Large File Support

Until now video renders had a maximum disk limit of 512MB which was used for source footage and the output video. This limitation made it difficult to create long videos or use large source footage files. Our latest upgrade makes it possible to import source footage up to 5GB and output videos up to 512MB in file size. Using the new disk option you can optimise performance based on speed vs file size.

Check the disk types documentation to enable large file size support and work out which disk type is most suitable for your needs.

Asset Caching

We have introduced asset caching which has reduced customer outbound bandwidth by up to 80%. Without caching our servers would download the same asset repeatedly for every render.

Now we will check if the asset has already been downloaded. If it has, we will reuse the cached asset instead of downloading it again, saving you bandwidth and improving render times by eliminating the time taken to download the asset.

Check the caching documentation to understand how caching works and how to disable it if required.

What’s Next?

This upgrade is part of our goal to become the leading provider of media generation infrastructure to help power the next generation of video and media centric applications.

By enabling faster render times and large file size support we believe we will open up our platform to new and exciting use cases.

In the upcoming months we’ll be further improving render speeds and allow you to create videos over an hour long at higher resolutions.

Stay tuned for updates.

Get started with Shotstack's video editing API in two steps:

Sign up for free to get your API key.

Send an API request to create your video:

curl --request POST 'https://api.shotstack.io/v1/render' \
--header 'x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY' \
--data-raw '{
  "timeline": {
    "tracks": [
      {
        "clips": [
          {
            "asset": {
              "type": "video",
              "src": "https://shotstack-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/footage/beach-overhead.mp4"
            },
            "start": 0,
            "length": "auto"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  },
  "output": {
    "format": "mp4",
    "size": {
      "width": 1280,
      "height": 720
    }
  }
}'