Set up Video Watermarking

A watermark is an image (such as a company logo) that is burned into a video stream, often used for branding or to indicate copyright ownership. The Widget Framework supports automated addition of watermarks to videos, but watermarking depends on setup of Amazon Elastic Transcoder as well the Widget Framework. Much of this process is covered in the Video Plug-in Guide.

Once Watermarking has been set up, it is very easy for editorial staff to use. The Widget Framework allows videos to be stamped with multiple watermarks in different positions if required. Exactly what watermarks are to be used can be set using section parameters. This means that you can, for example, configure the watermarks to be used on all the videos in a publication by setting watermark section parameters in the root section, and then override those settings locally by resetting the parameters in specific sections. In addition, the Video content type has a Disable Watermarking option that lets editorial staff turn off watermarking for individual videos if required.

The following description assumes that Amazon Elastic Transcoder has been set up to use the watermark IDs TopLeft, TopRight, BottomLeft and BottomRight as recommended in the Video Plug-in Guide.

To set up watermarking, you need to:

Find your watermark images

Find the images you want to use as watermarks. The images must be PNG or JPG files, and in addition, they must have one of the following extensions:

.jpg
.jpeg
.png

You must rename any images that have different extensions (for example .JPG). This requirement is due to a limitation in Amazon Elastic Transcoder.

Upload watermark images to the Content Engine

Upload the images in the usual way using Content Studio. However, do not upload them as Pictures, but as Watermark content items. For each image you want to upload, create a new Watermark content item and then select the image to upload. Make a note of each Watermark's content item ID, as you will need it when setting the section parameters in your publications.

Add watermark section parameters to your publications

You need to configure section parameters in every publication that is to use watermarking. To set up watermarking for a whole publication, add the parameters to the root section. To set up watermarking only in specific sections, or to override the publication level settings, add parameters to the specific sections.

For a detailed description of how to set the watermarking section parameters, see this section of the Video Plug-in Guide.