Build a fully automated post-production pipeline in the cloud. Use our REST API to trim, stitch, composite, and apply effects to video at scale. It’s a professional video editor, controlled entirely by code.
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Over 20,000 Businesses & Developers from 119 Countries Trust Shotstack
For most companies, video editing is the biggest bottleneck. It requires expensive software, powerful desktop computers, and human editors performing the same repetitive tasks over and over.
If you try to automate it yourself, you’re stuck managing complex, fragile FFmpeg scripts and expensive render farms. You spend more time managing infrastructure than building features.
You need a video processing API that offers the power of a desktop editor (multi-track timelines, compositing, and effects) but is accessible through simple, standard code.
It would have a ton of research on what technologies we needed to leverage technically to achieve the desired outcome. This would have taken at least two months of engineering time for a simple use case, and up to 6 months if the scope widened.
Shotstack is a cloud-based video editing API. We give you a multi-track timeline where you can layer video, audio, images, and text programmatically.
You define the edit instructions—start times, durations, transitions, and layers—and our rendering engine processes the video in the cloud. Whether you are processing one video or running a batch video editing job for thousands of assets, the performance is always consistent and fast.
Stop manually cutting clips. Use code to identify the exact start and end points of your footage. Programmatically edit video by stitching together multiple clips, removing silence, or reordering scenes based on your data.
Go beyond simple cuts. Our engine supports full compositing. Layer transparent PNGs, watermarks, GIFs, and dynamic text on top of your video tracks. Control opacity, positioning, and size to create professional-grade branded content automatically.
Automatically repurpose content for different platforms. Take a landscape video and programmatically crop it to a vertical 9:16 aspect ratio for TikTok or Instagram Reels. Smartly scale and position your footage to fit any screen size without distortion.
This application is the perfect example of a well executed and documented API. In less than 10 mins, set up, web hook done, and first render!
There are a couple of other options out there that attempt to provide the same or similar solution, but none of them come close in terms of quality, ease of use, and speed.
Shotstack was EXACTLY what I was looking for, and incredibly easy to get started with. You guys are killing it.
Programmatic video editing is the process of using code and algorithms to perform video editing tasks—like cutting, trimming, combining clips, and adding effects—without human intervention. Instead of a human using a mouse to drag clips on a timeline, a script sends instructions to an API, which performs the edits automatically.
Yes. Because Shotstack is a standard REST API, it is compatible with any programming language. We see many developers using Python for video editing scripts, often integrating with libraries like Pandas for data handling, before sending the render instructions to Shotstack. We also provide a dedicated Python SDK to make this even easier.
Speed is a priority. Our cloud video rendering engine processes videos in parallel. Simple edits often render in close to real-time (e.g., a 1-minute video renders in roughly 1 minute or less), depending on the resolution and complexity of the effects. Because we scale horizontally, you can render 1,000 videos simultaneously just as fast as rendering one.
Yes. This is a core feature. You can add text to video programmatically using our API by defining a text asset in your JSON payload. You have full control over the font file, size, color, alignment, and animation style (like fade-ins or slides), allowing for dynamic titles, subtitles, and lower-thirds.
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