The project
Overview
For the last few years, personalised video has been touted as
the next step in client communications. I was tasked with
enabling iLiveIt to generate cinematic personalised videos that
can be distributed through various channels.
Description
Creating personalised videos is a unique challenge that very few
companies ever attempt. Historically iLiveIt was creating
"slide"-like videos with almost no animation and essentially
required a developer to create the video in code. I wanted to
take things to the next level by bringing one of the most
powerful motion graphic tools into the fold,
Adobe After Effects
By utilising After Effects I was able to greatly improve the
design experience as designers were now able to use a tool they
know and love to create videos — only limited by their
imagination. I further created a C++ package plug-in for After
Effects that structured the project and assets in a way that
could simply be uploaded to the rendering front-end.
To enable large-scale rendering of the videos the backend
services (written in Go) would analyse the export package to
determine the most efficient order to render the frames in over
a cluster of servers before using
ffmpeg
to stitch the resulting frames into a complete video.
Below you can see the result of the video I created as a tech
demo. It features the personalisation of 3D effects, images,
text, and speech. "Riaan" is the name that was personalised in
the video.
