Create Advanced Encoding Workflows with Workflow Designer

  • Article

Overview

The Workflow Designer is a Windows desktop tool that is used to design and build custom workflows for encoding with Media Encoder Premium Workflow. By using the power of the workflow designer tool, you can design and create complex workflows that will run in Media Encoder Premium.

Workflows can include customer decision logic and branching based on the input source file's properties. You can create workflows with overridable properties and dynamic values to make even the most complex encoding tasks easy to repeat and customize in the cloud.

Example workflows that you can create include:

  • Decision based workflows that inspect the source content for resolution and encode only the desired output tracks. This is helpful by eliminating the wasted tracks that would be generated by upscaling the source content inadvertently.
  • Multiple input files can be used to support captions, overlays and stitching together content.

This tool can also be used to modify any of our published workflows.

Note

To get your copy of the Workflow Designer tool, please contact mepd@microsoft.com.

Once a workflow file is created, it can be uploaded as an Asset, and then be used for encoding media files. For information on how to encode with Media Encoder Premium Workflow using .NET, see Advanced encoding with Media Encoder Premium Workflow.

Modify existing workflows

The default published workflows can be modified using the designer tool.

The following videos demonstrate how to use the designer.

Day 1 – Getting Started

Day 1 video covers:

  • Designer Overview
  • Basic Workflows – "Hello World"
  • Creating multiple output MP4 files for use with Azure Media Services streaming

Day 2

Day 2 video covers:

  • Varying Source file scenarios – handling audio
  • Workflows with advanced Logic
  • Graph stages

Day 3

Day 3 video covers:

  • Scripting inside of Workflows/Blueprints
  • Restrictions with the current Encoder
  • Q&A