{"id":38688,"date":"2025-09-24T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/?p=38688"},"modified":"2025-10-02T16:04:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T23:04:19","slug":"transform-live-stream-recordings-polished-vods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/transform-live-stream-recordings-polished-vods","title":{"rendered":"How to Transform Live Stream Recordings Into Polished VODs Using Cloudinary"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a previous post, we covered how we can record and upload live streams to our Cloudinary Media Library. Once your recordings are in the library, Cloudinary provides powerful tools that make organizing, editing, and distributing your content much easier.\nWhat steps can we take if we want to optimize our recorded stream videos for playback and delivery to our audience? With Cloudinary, we can apply transformations to enhance recordings for playback without needing video editing software or creating them in different formats.\nIn this post, we\u2019ll focus on some common transformations and optimizations for getting a raw stream recording ready to be delivered in a video-on-demand format.<\/p>\n

Getting Started<\/h2>\n

To get started, we\u2019ll select a video in our Cloudinary Media Library to work with. The transformations we make to this video will serve as a template for our other media files and recordings, which we wish to optimize similarly.\nWe will begin by applying targeted transformations to our video and then deliver it to our audience in an optimized format.\nWe can use dynamic URL transformations to make changes for delivery without actually needing to edit the raw video stored in our media library. Before we start adding transformations, we need to get the URL to the video we want to work with. There\u2019s a button to copy the URL of the video item in your media library.<\/p>\n

\"Video<\/p>\n

Transformations<\/h2>\n

Here\u2019s the URL structure for video transformations:<\/p>\n

[https:\/\/res.cloudinary.com\/](https:\/\/res.cloudinary.com\/)<cloud_name>\/<asset_type>\/<delivery_type>\/<transformations>\/<version>\/<public_id>.<extension><\/code><\/p>\n

After copying our video URL, we have the base; now we will work on building additional parameters for the final version of our video.<\/p>\n

Trimming the Video<\/h3>\n

The first thing we want to do to prepare our recording for video on demand is trim out any dead air or extra padding at the beginning and end of the video. Scan through your recording in your media library and take note of the times that you would like to start and end the video.\nThere are a few ways to define the trim values for your video. Check out the documentation on trimming videos<\/a> for all the details. For this example, I\u2019m cutting off some time from the beginning and end of the video. I\u2019ll be using the start_offset<\/code> and end_offset<\/code> parameters.\nI\u2019m going to start at :10 and end at 1:20. For the transformation parameters, this translates to so_10,eo_70<\/code>. The start offset is 10 seconds, and the end offset is 70, which leaves us with one minute of video. This is our result:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/res.cloudinary.com\/doo88x3qd\/video\/upload\/so_10,eo_70\/v1747417890\/2025-05-16_13-45-33_uxxiwe.mp4<\/code><\/p>\n

The updated URL now serves a trimmed version of our video file.<\/p>\n

Adding a Splash Screen\/Thumbnail Image<\/h3>\n

Quirky placeholder images for videos are all the rage these days. Perhaps you prefer something a little bit more understated, but either way, it\u2019s never a bad idea to have an intro image for your videos.\nWe can use the concatenating media feature to add an image to the beginning of our video recording for a specified duration. All we need to do is upload the image that we intend to use to our media library and copy the image name.\nHere\u2019s the new URL where we\u2019ve prepended a three-second splash screen to the beginning of our stream video:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/res.cloudinary.com\/doo88x3qd\/video\/upload\/c_pad,w_1280,h_720\/l_stream-placeholder_ynxlua.png,fl_splice,du_3,w_1280,h_720\/so_0,fl_layer_apply\/so_10,eo_70,w_1280,h_720\/v1747417890\/2025-05-16_13-45-33_uxxiwe.mp4<\/code><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Thumbnail<\/p>\n

There are a lot of new parameters, so let\u2019s break them down from left to right:<\/p>\n