Smart Image and Video Optimization for Web

Fast and efficient web video production for ecommerce

Repurposing and publishing videos on the web usually consists of common video transformations like resizing, trimming, watermarking, sound removal, or branding -overlaying logos, texts or any graphic content-. It commonly requires four steps:

1. First, setting the aspect ratio, resizing the video with a new master resolution.
2. Second, trimming the footage to choose the excerpt we want to feature in a prominent placement like the home or category overview pages.
3. Third, editing the video specifically for these pages, which means overlaying graphics -logo, text- or even images.
4. And usually, also removing the soundtrack since they are intented for autoplay which requires muted reproduction by browsers.

These simple tasks may reveal tricky with common tools and solutions. Especilly in ecommerce and marketing, where videos must be frequently repurposed to be published in different parts of the online store, used in marketplaces, or shared in social networks. This results in the following recomendations:

• Keep video editing simple. While professional suites like AfterEffects, DaVinci, Premiere, or Photoshop are great tools for creating high quality graphics to overlay, for color grading or for creating transitions and visual effects in movies, they are not good for automating simple operations that are so frequent in web and ecommerce workflows. To deal with simple operations, use Abraia to automate essential video editing operations -trimming, resizing, watermarking, sound removal- with no distracting options and fuss.
• Automate video operations. If you are reusing your product and marketing videos in different places, you are likely repeating a bunch of operations that are better done automatically. Automate batch video processing -transcoding, resizing, or repetitive branding- for a video marketing campaigns, and common video publishing transformations and optimizations. Again, automating and constraining the final stages of video production workflows will reinforce our branding consistency. We should bear in mind that unnecesary manual operations are prone to unpleasant surprises.
• Repurpose video content consistently. In the likely case we have produced a high quality 2 min video for our stories pages, we should reuse it. Just by trimming and extracting 5s to 15s clips and removing the soundtrack, we can create with almost no effort dozens of product videos, background videos, and video teasers for our marketing pages and our social media.
• Keep video branding consistent. If we want to build a brand, we should be consistent. A well defined set of consistent logos and campaign messages -colors, shapes, fonts- is essential. It is also a good practice to specify technically the types of content that we use. The aspect ratio or the target duration are examples of technical measures of a video with a b impact on aesthetics.
• Automate multi channel videos creation. When we sell in marketplaces like Amazon, Tmall or Instagram shopping, we will need to repurpose our videos to meet the requirements -on aspect ratio, duration or content- of the platform. In most cases, producing videos that meet the requirements of a marketplace consists of resizing and cropping and readjusting the branding. This is something we can easily automate using Abraia.
• Build background videos from campaign videos. They are commonplace in fashion ecommerce sites and usually consist of short -about 5s to 15s- muted clips with the styling and branding of the campaign, consumed with autoplay. This makes background videos a clear repurposing use case. They're frequently excerpts of the main editorial video footage. Moreover, background videos usually cover the full page width. For a responsive design, we'll need to use two aspect ratios, one for horizontal screens (desktop, tablet) and other for vertical screens (smartphones). So, whatever the original footage is, we'll do some kind of editing to extract variants that alters the content.
• Create social media teaser videos. Each social network has one or more types of videos, intended for different types of use. Each of them features a fixed aspect ratio -and usually resolution- and a recommended duration. For instance, Instagram stories videos are limited to 15s long and should have full HD resolution in vertical orientation -that is 1080x1920 px-. When we have video content, which is expensive and lengthy to produce, we should take the most of it and sharing short teaser videos through social media. But, this requires a steady flow of ephemerous content that builds the desired brand image. In this context, efficiency, consistency, and effectiveness are essential.

A clean production workflow will prevent frequent problems that appear downstream -in the video delivery and video consumption stages- and usually damage the user experience and the image of our brand.