Post-Production Efficiencies Hold Key to Video ROI
It’s an open secret that video is becoming a priority investment for brands. A recent Cloudinary survey of web developers, marketers, and business leaders confirmed this:
- 81% intend to increase video integration on their websites and mobile apps in the future.
- 78% credit video’s role in building trust and confidence among consumers
- 65% use video to enhance market awareness
- 54% recognise video’s impact on driving purchases as a top benefit
The rationale for more video investment is clear. The typical internet user spends 88% more time on websites with video than those without it. It also directly impacts sales and revenue: adding a video to a landing page can increase your conversion rate by up to 86%.
Post-Production is Complex and Slow
The catch is that many brands also tend to face substantial difficulties navigating post-production workflows efficiently. It’s simply not easy to manage, enrich, adapt and customise videos for every use case and deliver optimised videos to any channel and viewer context.
In fact, brands encounter more bottlenecks in creating video variants for different channels and devices (58%) than in producing original videos (46%). One in four report facing prolonged delays in publishing videos, with 75% saying it takes them hours or days to publish their videos.
This is all exacerbated by the fact that one third of the respondents reported that their teams struggled with a general lack of knowledge around the technical best practices needed to try and improve these obstacles organically.
Automations to Streamline Video Post-Production
The good news is that you can solve these challenges by automating as much of your video workflow as possible. Some of my favourite innovations include:
AI Video Summarizations and Previews
Repurposing a longer video into short summarised versions is a great way to earn clicks to the full video on your website or to use as an eye-catching teaser on social media. However, manually editing and creating these summaries or previews can be highly resource intensive. With AI, you can automatically generate summaries or previews based on the most compelling parts of the full video. All you need to do is identify the preview duration and number of segments you want to include.
AI-Powered Transcripts, Subtitles, and Chapters
Adding captions and subtitles to your marketing, lifestyle, and/or explainer videos can vastly improve user engagement and accessibility - it can also take a long time to create them for every video. AI-based speech-to-text transcription can automate the process of creating transcripts and using them to generate subtitles and even localizing them for global audiences. Similarly, AI can automatically separate longer-form videos into chapters with relevant titles to help users navigate to their priority segment and help your team ID the most relevant clips for various use cases.
Smart Cropping
The aspect ratio of a video may not always be optimal for the platform or device being used to view it. For instance, to make a video suitable for mobile on social media apps, you may want to trim it to a square or vertical aspect ratio. Manually doing this for every asset is incredibly tedious, but you can now use AI to automatically crop, resize, and focus on specific elements within a video for optimal viewing on any device and channel.
Image to Video
The ability to make your static images come to life with dynamic video-like effects presents an incredible opportunity for brands to get started with video, and it’s a great option for repurposing your existing assets while building out the video use case. AI can detect the critical objects in the original image and produce a derivative video asset that delivers the same message in a more engaging format.
Progressive Download and Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR)
Selecting the optimal format and quality for every asset for every user context is near impossible to do manually, but is critical to reduce file size, improve page load time, and boost Core Web Vitals. For short videos, Progressive Download embeds the video directly onto the page, eliminating the need for a video player, reducing page weight, and improving page performance. For longer videos, go with ABR, which enables you to deliver videos instantly without buffering using on-the-fly encoding and automatic format and quality selection.
AI-Driven Tagging
Accurately tagging video assets is crucial for ensuring those videos can be found and used in any campaign in which they’re relevant, but it can take huge amounts of time and resources to do manually. Instead, you can use AI tools to automatically and instantly analyze each scene and suggest relevant tags.
Accelerate Video Workflows and Maximise ROI
Together, these innovative tools can automate and streamline video workflows from creation to delivery, enhancing efficiency and driving higher conversion rates. Importantly, they also allow your technical teams to focus on more strategic and valuable initiatives.
The path to great video ROI is paved with great efficiencies, enabled by automations that not only simplify video post-production workflows but also ensure consistency and quality across all channels.
With the power of AI only set to expand from here, brands that invest in these capabilities will be better positioned to meet the growing demand for video content - and achieve the highest returns on their investments.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Cloudinary. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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