UC Render Timelines

Motivation

Rendering a timeline creates a new physical file from one or more source files. The timeline is stored as VidiCore item sequence and describes in detail how the source file(s) shall be combined into the destination file.

Rendering timelines usually is done in the context of a product, e.g. VidiEditor. The following workflow describes how VidiEditor is rendering its timelines and can serve as a blueprint for initiating the rendering process directly on the VidiCore API.

Workflow

To render a timeline via VidiCore follow these steps:

Create a placeholder item – see ‎UC Import A File Into A New Item .
Attach a sequence to the item:

CODE

PUT /API/item/<itemId>/sequence/vidispine

<SequenceDocument xmlns='http://xml.vidispine.com/schema/vidispine'>
    [...]

Render the sequence:

CODE

POST /API/item/<itemId>/sequence/render?tag=<destinationTag>&original=<destinationTag>&sourceTag=original&jobmetadata=destinationStorageId%3d<destinateStorageId>

When rendering the sequence it is important to specify the desired destinationShapeTag not only in the tag parameter (which defines the transcoding profile to use) but also in the original parameter. Technical fields like mediaType, originalVideoCodec etc. are only set at the item when the item gets an original shape. To achieve this for a render job you need to specify the additional query parameter original and supply the same shape tag as for the tag parameter.

The field V3_ExpectedMediaType (string) on item-level should be set to video so that the MediaPortal connector can identify these items as videos even if they don’t have a continuous hires shape, yet.