Goodbye to 2022, hello 2023!
We are excited to share some important product updates that will help you unleash the full potential of visual media while conserving valuable resources and time. Cloudinary’s latest innovations, launched last December, enable you to programmatically generate video, photorealistic images, and collages at scale, enable on the fly background removal and better support the mobile app channel with new SDKs. (Technical details for product updates and releases can be found here.)
Let’s dive in!
It’s well known that video is one of the best ways to drive brand awareness and increase sales conversion. It’s equally well known that generating video is expensive and labor intensive. Lacking the time and resources to create video content is the number one challenge most brands face when using video in their marketing. This is where developers can leverage the power of Cloudinary to help out their marketing counterparts.
Cloudinary’s new Video generation feature programmatically creates videos at scale by combining existing video snippets, images, text, and colors as tracks. You can create animation with effects such as zoom in / out, pan from full frame to a new center, and support transitions which specify how one video clip blends into the next.
Plus, create a reusable template that instantly generates multiple variations of a video then apply this template to create new videos. Video Generation is currently in beta but we invite you to try it out and share feedback with our support team!
Another video innovation is the new “fetch for video” feature that grabs a remote video URL, applies your video transformations to the asset then delivers the video in the optimal format (f_auto) and quality (q_auto). This is particularly useful when you store video files outside of Cloudinary but want to take advantage of our transformation and delivery APIs to create variations for web, mobile, and social or to enhance and personalize them.
3D views of a product go a long way in increasing conversion on your commerce pages and reducing online returns. According to Forbes, brands that show customers exactly what they are buying can achieve up to 80% reduction in online returns.
Cloudinary offers ways to generate immersive media such as 360 degree animated spinset, and 360 degree video from 3D models, however our latest feature now enables you to also generate a photorealistic 2D image using a 3D model. Using the e_camera parameter in the URL you can customize a 2D image captured from a 3D model – as if a photo is being taken by a camera. You can set the camera position, zoom, lighting, exposure, and background environment to programmatically generate the perfect shot! You can use the texture swapping effect in conjunction to dress up surfaces with desired fabric, texture, color, or pattern – a powerful tool to build multiple variations for product displays.
Continuing with the theme of “generating images at scale,” Cloudinary’s new Image Collage feature auto-generates quality image collages. This is particularly helpful when you want to display several aspects of a product in a single image due to limited real estate on your site or app. You can also use them to generate banners, email header images, event or sale posters, and much more! Learn more in this blog.
Cloudinary’s deep-learning algorithms, accurately identify the primary object in an image and remove the background in seconds. Previously, this popular AI background removal feature took place during upload to Cloudinary. Now you can apply this transformation on-the-fly during delivery keeping the original intact. You can also apply actions such as applying the background a gray scale or replacing it with another image. Here’s a simple example:
46% of retailers have plans to spend more time on their custom mobile app in 2022 and will likely continue to do so in 2023. In anticipation of this uptick, Cloudinary is offering mobile SDKs for popular frameworks – iOS, Android, Kotlin – that include helper methods to speed development and continuous access to our latest innovations. We are now happy to announce a new addition to this list: Flutter SDK (currently in beta). With this addition to our SDK portfolio, you can deliver great mobile image and video experiences using your existing Flutter framework. This also includes a dedicated widget that wraps Flutter’s authenticated Image Widget for seamless integration into your apps.
Bonus: we are adding a new frontend SDK: Vue.js. This includes a package (@cloudinary/vue) that simplifies the generation of transformation URLs, and includes special components and directives for easy embedding of assets in your Vue.js application.
That’s it for now! Check back soon for the latest innovations and updates from Cloudinary.
