Use Templates in Your Publishing

In our recent “Publishing Best Practices” series we provided information to help publish your content faster.
This post will show you how you can use template entries to increase your efficiency, spare you from repeating entering default values and make your publishing process more streamlined and professional.

All this is possible using Kaltura’s Transcoding Profiles (aka Conversion Profiles).
Transcoding Profiles are used to determine what ‘flavors’ your entry will be converted to. Every time you ingest an entry into the system you need to assign a transcoding profile to the entry so the system will know what flavors the entry should be converted to.
There is also a Default Transcoding Profile that is used if you choose not to manually specify the transcoding profile ID.
The idea is to have several transcoding profiles for each of your publishing categories, for example: one transcoding profile for mobile and web  formats and one for web format only, this way you can save space and have efficient, lean entries.
Another less known feature of the transcoding profiles is the “default metadata settings” (see  image #2), which lets you add custom metadata to your video copied from a given Entry ID.
Let’s say you target two distinct audiences with your videos, the first is public facing video and the second is internal company videos.
You can create two transcoding profiles, one for each of your target audiences, even though you might convert them to the same flavors you can use different “default metadata settings” so your public facing videos will have their specific metadata values, while the internal company videos can have different fields or data. All this is done automatically after you prepare one template entry for the process.
So how do I use default metadata settings?
First start by creating the template entry you want to use:

1. Create a “no media” entry, using the upload menu – see image #2
2. Set the needed metadata for the entry: name, tags, etc., I would recommend a name like: “Template Entry for Transcoding Profile X”
3. If you use custom metadata just edit the entry metadata fields so they reflect the template data for your company, for example if you have “company name” field than probably your company name won’t change.
4. If you don’t use custom metadata, click here to learn more about it.

Then set the template entry on the transcoding profile:

1. In the KMC  go to settings->transcoding profiles, there you can select the flavors of your default transcoding profile.
2. Press the “Switch to Advanced Mode” link at the bottom of the page – see image #1
3. Now edit the transcoding profile you wish to create a template entry for by clicking it’s name
4. In the “Edit Transcoding profile” form choose the “Default metadata setting” field – see image #4
5. Enter the Entry ID you want to set as the template entry – the template entry we created above.

Hopes this helps in improving and proffesionlizing your publishing methods.
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