Cropping, partial renders, frame rates, mp3 exporting and more

It's a new year and we're kicking things off with a huge update including a feast of new features to take your automated video editing and media generation to the next level.

Cropping

You can now crop images and videos to create cool split screen effects, anomorphic aspect ratios or show only part of an asset on screen. Check out the demo below for an idea of what's possible.

You can check our API docs to see how to crop a video or image asset.

Frames Per Second (FPS)

Whether you want to make the most of modern digital devices that shoot at 30 fps, recreate a cinematic 24 frame rate effect or create gifs with smaller file sizes, now you can with our custom FPS settings. Check out our complete guide to frame rate and fps settings to chose the best frame rate for your video.

Partial Render Ranges

Render just part (range) of a video by specifying a start point and a length. This can be useful when you want to create a short preview of your video. For example, you want to create a 5 second gif preview to insert into an email or a 15 second snippet for social media. It's also useful if you want to preview just a small section of a video before rendering the whole video. Our API reference docs have been updated with the latest range render output option.

MP3 Exporting

Shotstack doesn't just have to be about video, we've released a dedicated mp3 export type so you can now edit and export audio only. You can now edit podcasts, create personalised podcast ads or automatically insert ads into a podcast in a matter of minutes. Just set the output format to mp3.

4:5 Aspect Ratio

Support for 4:5 vertical video aspect ratio preferred by Instagram has been added. If you are automating videos for Instagram this is the aspect ratio you have been waiting for. To export videos at 4:5 just set the aspect ratio to 4:5 in the output settings.

And there's more

You can now add volume effects (fade in and fade out) to audio assets. We fixed a couple of bugs; thumbnails and poster images at second 0 export the first frame instead of an empty frame, and the soundtrack volume can now have the volume set to 0. Finally, if you managed to export vertical or square videos without a watermark in our staging account we've fixed that little loophole.