When you see the term boomerang, what is the first thing that comes to mind?
A thrown tool made of wood that returns to its thrower? Another definition is reversal, logically portraying the aim of the tool itself. Based on this definition, the term "boomerang videos” came into play to depict videos that loop back and forth.
Boomerang videos have become popular since a few years ago as videos make up a large portion of communications on social media. Little wonder that Instagram moved fast in 2016 to integrate this feature into its app. Indisputably, motion graphics are leading the trend for online chats, leading to a significant increase in GIFs and boomerang videos.
Boomerang videos are fun and appealing, , especially for advertisers, because they keep you glued for a few more seconds—ample time in which to spotlight the core capabilities of the products in question. A good example is the showcase of Microsoft's Surface Book laptop on Instagram. Short, simple, and concise advertisements like that never fail to catch attention.
Boomerang videos are also in popular use for memes, which are usually in the form of humorous images, videos, or text. Those videos are nothing new, however. Many high-profile videos, such as Jidenna’s Boomerang, have adopted this format for a while
With Cloudinary’s e-boomerang capability, which enables videos to reverse themselves, you can add effects and transformations to the media stored on your console. Adding the effect doubles the length of the video, whose second half shows the reverse of the first half.
Since boomerang videos are supposed to be brief, Cloudinary’s eo_# effect reduces the video length. The eo_ effect is an existing feature. For example, to trim your video to 3 seconds, add the eo_3 effect. Afterwards, by adding Cloudinary’s chained transformations to the e-boomerang effect, you generate a video length of 6 seconds. That’s because Cloudinary has selected the first 3 seconds from the original video and another 3 seconds from the reversed version of the selected clip.
Another interesting characteristic of boomerang videos is their repetitions. To keep a boomerang video looping, add the e_loop effect along with the eo_3.
Even though you might not know their proper name, you must have seen boomerang videos before. However, despite the fact that such videos have been around for years, creating them is no cakewalk for many web developers. Enter Cloudinary. Thanks to its intuitive video manipulation techniques with e_boomerang, creating boomerang videos on Cloudinary is a seamless, simple process.
Do try it out: Create a Cloudinary account first and then upload videos and add awesome effects and transformations. Problems? Thoughts? Describe them in the Comments section . We welcome your feedback.
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When we started our journey in 2012, we were looking to improve our lives as developers by making it easier for us to handle the arduous tasks of handling images and videos in our code. That initial line of developer code has evolved into a full suite of media experience solutions driven by a mission that gradually revealed itself over the course of the past 10 years: help companies unleash the full potential of their media to create the most engaging visual experiences.
When brands like you adopt a direct–to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce approach with no involvement of retailers or marketplaces, you gain direct and timely insight into evolving shopping behaviors. Accordingly, you can accommodate shoppers’ preferences by continually adjusting your product offering and interspersing the shopping journey with moments of excitement and intrigue. Opportunities abound for you to cultivate engaging customer relationships.
No matter your business focus—public service, B2B integration, recruitment—multimedia, in particular video, is remarkably effective in communicating with the audience. Before, making video accessible to diverse viewers involved tasks galore, such as eliciting the service of production studios to manually dub, transcribe, and add subtitles. Those operations were costly and slow, especially for globally destined content.
Shoppers return time and again to Minted’s global online community of independent artists and designers because they know they can count on unique, statement-making products of the highest quality there. Concurrently, the visual imagery on Minted.com must do justice to the designs into which the creators have poured their hearts and souls.
For Minted’s VP of Engineering David Lien, “Because we are a premium brand, we need to ensure that every single one of our product images matches the selected configuration exactly. For example, if you pick an 18x24 art print on blue canvas, we will show that exact combination on the hero images in the PDF.”
New year, same trend! Visual media will continue to play a monumental role in driving online conversions. To keep up with visual-experience trends and best practices, Cloudinary holds an annual conference called ImageCon, a one-of-a-kind event that helps attendees create the most engaging visual experiences possible.
