Archiving Masters

In this topic, you will learn about archiving the digital master for the video when you ingest it.

Introduction

If you archive a master when you ingest a video, you will be able to re-transcode the video later without ingesting it again. This topic explains your options for archiving your masters. Note that archiving the master means storing the master video file in your account so that it is available for future processing. See Creating Ingest Profiles for Dynamic Delivery for more information.

Note that if you store the digital master when you ingest the video, and then retranscode the video using a profile that does not archive masters, the digital master for the video will not be removed, and you will still be able to retranscode the video.

Archiving a master

To archive a master for your video, you need to include the digital_master object in your ingest profile:

    {
        "account_id": 3423487123048,
        "digital_master": {
            "rendition": "passthrough",
            "distribute": false
        },
        "name": "nondrm-default",
        ...
    }

Source or rendition

For Dynamic Delivery (including Context Aware Encoding) profiles, you can archive the video source file as a master (in other words, set "rendition": "passthrough" in the digital_master part of the profile). The digital_master will not be distributed (pushed to the CDN as an available rendition) for these profiles, even if you set "distribute": true.

For Legacy Ingest profiles, you can choose to use your video source file as the master, or you can select a high-quality rendition to use as the master.

To use the video source file you ingest as the master, include the following code in your ingest profile:

    "digital_master": {
        "rendition": "passthrough",
        "distribute": false
    }

To use a rendition for the master instead of your source file (Legacy Ingest profiles only), set the rendition field of the digital_master object to the reference id for the rendition:

    "digital_master": {
            "rendition": "av0",
            "distribute": true
        },
        "name": "nondrm-av0",
        "packages": [],
        "renditions": [
        {
            "media_type": "video",
            "reference_id": "av0", ...

If you set rendition to none, no master will be archived, and you will not be able to retranscode the video. You can, however, replace the video by ingesting it again.

Distribution

Distribution will only work for Legacy Ingest profiles.

You can choose whether the master is distributed or not. Distributed means that the master is pushed to the CDN and available as a playable rendition. If the master is not distributed, it is archived by Video Cloud but not pushed to the CDN.

Notes:
  • If you selected one of your renditions to be the master, and set distribute to false, that rendition will not be pushed to the CDN and will not be available for playback
  • If the rendition is set to passthrough and distribute to true, the master will only be distributed if it is in h264 format
  • The original video may be modified in order to make it playable over the internet. The archived master will be identical to the original file, however, except in very rare cases where we need to modify it in order to transcode it
  • Distributing the master does not work for videos ingested using Dynamic Delivery profiles. If you look at the Dynamic Delivery ingest profiles, you will see that distribute is set to false. If you duplicate the profile and attempt to change that in Studio, the value will revert to false automatically.

To distribute the master to the CDN, set "distribute": true in the digital_master object:

    "digital_master": {
        "distribute": true,
        "rendition": "passthrough"
    }

To prevent the master from being distributed, set distribute to false:

    "digital_master": {
        "distribute": false,
        "rendition": "passthrough"
    }

Default behavior

By default (if the profile does not include a digital_master field), the Dynamic Ingest API and Upload Module will behave exactly as if the following had been included in the profile:

    "digital_master": {
        "distribute": false,
        "rendition": "none"
    }

In other words, no digital master will be stored.

If you have the following in your profile:

    "digital_master": {
        "distribute": false
    }

... with no rendition field to specify what should be archived, the source video will be archived as the digital master.

Standard profiles

The standard profiles for Dynamic Delivery as well as the legacy ingest system will automatically store masters but not distribute them:

Standard Dynamic Delivery profiles

  • multi-platform-extended-static
  • multi-platform-extended-static-with-MP4
  • multi-platform-standard-static
  • multi-platform-standard-static-with-MP4
  • multi-platform-extended-dynamic
  • multi-platform-extended-dynamic-with-MP4
  • multi-platform-standard-dynamic
  • multi-platform-standard-dynamic-with-MP4
  • low-bandwidth-dynamic

Standard legacy ingest system profiles

  • videocloud-default-v1
  • high-definition
  • audio-only
  • single-bitrate-standard
  • single-bitrate-high
  • screencast-1280
  • smart-player-transition