Introduction

The Escenic Content Engine's Video plug-in extends Content Studio with the functionality required to efficiently manage web site media content.

The Video plug-in provides:

• Fully-automated transcoding of video and audio content using Amazon Elastic Transcoder

• Fully-automated distribution of published video and audio content using Amazon CloudFront

• Simple Video and Audio editing functionality in Content Studio

• Optional integration with external media storage solutions such as media asset management systems

The Video plug-in's objective is to make handling media content in the context of web site production as painless as possible, so the editing functionality added to Content Studio is a very simple timeline editor that is specifically geared to the needs of online publishing. The timeline editor allows you to:

• Crop an audio or video clip (that is select the segment you actually want to publish)

• Add cue points (links that allow viewers/listeners to go directly to points of interest in the clip)

• Add transient links to a clip (links to related content that appear and disappear while a clip is playing)

• Select a poster frame for a video clip (a still that can be used to represent the clip when it is not playing)

All of these editing functions are non-destructive: that is, they do not modify the source media object, they only affect the published result.

The source media objects can either be internal or external, according to how they are stored:

• An internal media object is one that is stored under the control of the Content Engine, in exactly the same way as an image or any other kind of binary file. A media object of this kind is usually acquired by uploading to Content Studio (although they can also be imported in various ways, just like any other content items).

• An external media object is one that is stored somewhere on the net, most likely in a media asset management (MAM) system such as Vizrt's VizOne, or in some other storage solution. A media object of this kind is usually supplied to the Video plug-in via an integration interface which may be:

  • The Content Engine web service

  • The Content Engine syndication subsystem

  • Drag and drop between the source application and Content Studio

  External media objects are not supported in the current version.