Accelerating Mundane Video Workflows

Written By Aditya Ghule Mar-30-2023 4 Min Read

Video is increasingly leveraged by brands to drive online engagement and conversion. According to a su rvey from Wyzowl of over 500 brands –

95% say video marketing has helped them increase brand awareness
87% say video marketing has helped them increase sales

Given the significance of video in increasing marketing ROI, brands need to get videos to their various digital channels (website, mobile app, social media, IoT) faster. This is easier said than done. Once a video is produced, there are several time and labor-intensive workflows the video must go through before it’s pushed live.

This article covers some of these critical but mundane workflows and ways to accelerate them to scale video across all digital touch points in minutes.

Mundane Video Workflows

Once your creative team or agency completes a video production and delivers your material, it typically undergoes some or all of the steps below before an end-user is able to view it.

Management – This includes uploading the video to a local or cloud-based storage service, placing it in an appropriate folder and applying necessary metadata and tags for ease of discoverability.
Transformation – This is the process of cropping, reframing the video and creating variants that adapt to the design and size of various devices, channels on which the video may be viewed. Video previews or thumbnails are also created to increase engagement.
Customization – For use across third-party sites and social media, the video is often customized by overlaying branded logos, imagery, or text. In some cases watermarks are applied to protect intellectual property.
Optimization – Next, the video needs to be encoded in an optimal format and codec to reduce the original size so it takes less bandwidth and storage.
Delivery – Finally to ensure the video can be viewed across a global audience at home or on the go, the encoded video is often transcoded to an appropriate format, bitrate, and resolution based on the end-user’s device and internet connection.

Challenges and Opportunities

Depending on the video technology used and manual workflows involved, above processes can take hours and in some instances even days to perform. This means losing untold numbers of opportunities to convert casual visitors into engaged audiences or even worse, losing them to your competition.

Leading brands often rely on programmatic and AI-powered automation to accelerate such mundane video workflows and increase engagement.

For instance, a leading US sports site, Bleacher Report is able to automate mundane video workflows from management, transformation, optimization and delivery to enable near-instant highlights of major sporting events on their website and mobile app. Given their users are hyper-engaged during a game, this unique video feature has enabled them to increase total video views by 25% per month !

Another example is Vorwerk, a leading German manufacturer and creator of Thermomix, smart kitchen appliance used by millions of users worldwide. By automating creation of video variants, customization and dynamic selection of optimal format, codecs they were able to deliver 66,000 recipes across their website, mobile app, and different IoT devices globally; even in China.

Delegate the Drudgery to Cloudinary

Cloudinary’s programmatic video solution with AI-driven automation provides users the ability to go from video creation to delivery in minutes. Once your video is uploaded into Cloudinary, our proprietary AI takes care of automating the many critical yet mundane workflows needed to deliver video to all your digital channels. Speed up time to market and increase online conversion while also freeing up valuable technical resources.

Cloudinary features that accelerate common video workflows are

Upload presets – Setup predefined rules for storage or for normalization of videos during the upload process like, fine-tuning saturation, brightness, contrast levels, audio levels for consistent video experience.
AI-based tagging – Cloudinary’s proprietary AI technology automatically applies metadata and tags like, video description, item or SKU number, campaign name, event type, and more for ease of discoverability.
Auto-crop – Leverage AI-based, content-aware video cropping capability for each unique end-point such as product display pages, mobile apps, social media, and more. It analyzes the video for the most interesting parts and when cropping focuses on those precise spotlights, saving thousands of man hours for this critical task.
Intelligent previews – Automatically generate eye-catching video previews using deep learning algorithms that identify the most interesting video segments.
Custom overlays – Dynamically add layers to specific locations within your videos either to customize with branded logo, watermarks, or imagery. With simple URL-based transformations you can customize thousands of videos in seconds.
Interactive video – Use Cloudinary’s built-in video player to add interactive or shoppable links to your video to increase conversion.
Dynamic optimization – Cloudinary automatically selects the optimal format, codec and resolution at the time of delivery to ensure the best possible compression while maintaining your video’s visual quality.