Image editing, Serve API, shuffle transition and more

This release adds a host of new features to enhance your creativity and increase engagement with your customers and users. Read on to learn more about what we've added and how it will help you achieve your media generation goals.

Photo and image editing

We have added support to output jpg, png and bmp image files. You can now use all the available video editing features to generate images. Create a template using JSON and generate 1000's of personalised or data driven images in seconds.

You can create images as part of an application or workflow for e-commerce, social media and marketing campaigns. Grab frames out of a video or combine image and video generation by performing a multi-step edit to create a freeze frame effect like the video below.

The image editing API is bundled with all our plans, and you can get started for free or develop using the developer sandbox. Follow the hello world tutorial to generate your first image using code or check out the image border demo for Node, PHP and Ruby.

Serve API SDK

Last month we launched our integrated video hosting and CDN service. The Serve API is an asset management API that lets you look up assets hosted on the CDN by render id or asset id and delete any assets you no longer need.

The Serve API is now fully documented in our API reference documentation and available in our Node, PHP and Ruby SDK's.

Shuffle transition

A release wouldn't be complete without a new creative feature. We have added the Shuffle, a card like motion effect that can be used to create overlapping slideshows or swooping video transitions. The affect can start and end in eight different directions letting you create videos like this:

Transition speeds

A fast and slow variation of each transition has been added allowing for more variation so you can create subtle or dynamic transitions depending on the mood of your video.

All existing transitions can now be appended with a Slow or Fast keyword to affect the speed. For example fadeSlow will fade a clip over 2 seconds, fadeFast over 0.5 seconds and the original fade lasts for 1 second. The API reference includes a list of all available transitions.

Quality setting

Depending on your requirements you may have a need to adjust the output quality of your video or image output. The default setting, medium, has been optimized for web usage and provides the best mix of image quality to file size, which translates to better performance.

Setting quality to low will result in a marginally reduced visual quality but much smaller file size which can help reduce storage requirements and make your videos and images faster to download.

The high quality setting will produce an output that is considered visually lossless while still providing adequate compression. The file size and bitrate will be higher meaning that more storage will be needed, and will be slower to download or stream on slower connections. The high quality setting is recommended for situations that require higher bit rates or where the video will be transcoded or compressed again after rendering.

Custom width and height

Instead of using built in resolutions and aspect ratios you can now specify your own image and video sizes. This is particularly useful for generating images which don't follow more conventional video specifications. Just set a custom width and height for your video up to 1920px or images up to 4096px.

The sample banner above was made using a background image, a button image, logo, HTML and a custom size of 728px x 90px. The output size is documented in the API reference.

That's it for now. We're working on more exciting features and performance enhancements all the time and will keep you up to date.