Cloud Rendering: size and speed do matter

For years, Mapcreator has made it easy to get maps out of the tool in whatever format your production workflow and audience require: static maps, interactive maps, and video.

Now, we’re adding another piece to the puzzle: server-side rendering (SSR) in the Mapcreator cloud.

Rendering fast vs. rendering small

Our existing video rendering is designed with one thing in mind: speed.

Videos are rendered directly in your browser using modern web codecs and rendering technologies. This means you can get your video downloaded quickly, without having to wait for a remote rendering process to finish.

When we first shipped this, it turned a few heads. Broadcast tooling has a long tradition of render farms, render queues and waiting your turn — the idea that a browser could produce a broadcast-ready animated map in seconds, on the machine already sitting on the desk, just wasn’t how things were done. Because nothing says breaking news like waiting politely in a render queue… It became one of our clearest USPs, and for many teams it still is: no job ticket, no queue, no render server somewhere in the building deciding when your map is ready.

There is another advantage: your browser remains free to use. Rendering locally could be the kind of thing that grinds a workstation to a halt. Performance is as high as ever, so you can continue your work, browse the web, or do whatever else you need to do while the video is being prepared.

The trade-off? The resulting video files can be relatively large.

And that’s where things get interesting.

The last mile is often the bottleneck

Getting a video out of Mapcreator is only part of the job.

In a newsroom, that video usually needs to make its way into the production workflow afterwards. Traditionally, that means:

Render → Download → Find the file → Upload/import into the newsroom → Continue production

It’s a perfectly workable process. But it’s also a manual step. And manual steps are exactly where things can get forgotten, misplaced, or slow down a busy production team.

So we asked ourselves: what if the video didn’t need to come through your computer at all?

Enter the stage: cloud rendering

With Mapcreator’s new server-side rendering, the video is rendered in the Mapcreator cloud instead of on your local machine.

The cloud renderer uses FFmpeg, a widely adopted video processing framework to create the final video file.

The difference is simple:

• Local rendering: faster rendering, larger files
• Cloud rendering: longer rendering, smaller files, and more output flexibility
  

And because the work happens in the cloud , the longer waiting time matters a lot less. You don’t need to sit around waiting for the render to finish. You can move on to the next task while the rendering happens independently in the background.

Smaller files are only the start

File size is the most visible difference, but it isn’t the most interesting one. A browser can only encode what the browser knows how to encode, and that list is short. FFmpeg’s is not. Broadcast-specific codecs, container formats, interlaced output, bit depth and chroma subsampling, frame rate and bitrate control, and a long tail of genuinely obscure flags: things that never made it into the web platform, but that a playout system will still refuse as a file.

That matters most for broadcasters running more than one station. Delivery specs are rarely uniform across a network: one channel wants interlaced, another progressive; one wants a different wrapper or a different bitrate ceiling. Because these settings live with the workspace, each station’s defaults are loaded correctly every time, for every person working in it. Nobody has to remember which preset their channel needs, and nobody has to discover it was wrong after the file has been handed over.

With server-side rendering, Mapcreator can render client-specific video codecs when needed. Because in broadcast, “it plays on my laptop” is rarely the final technical specification.

Your video, ready when you need it

Once the rendering is complete, Mapcreator provides a link to the finished video.

The file remains available in the Mapcreator cloud for 90 days, giving you plenty of time to bring it into your normal production workflow. In practice, that means the video always stays where it was rendered: you pass on the link, point your newsroom system at it, or let the next step in the chain pull it directly. 

There’s no local copy to keep track of. No need to wait for a download. And no need to remember where you saved that video three days ago.

What if? Your cloud, not ours

There’s another story to this. Cloud rendering doesn’t have to mean Mapcreator’s cloud.

The same rendering process can run against your own cloud environment, with the finished files landing in your own storage. For broadcasters with strict requirements around where media lives — or with an ingest pipeline, MAM, or archive that already watches a specific bucket — this closes the loop entirely. The map is stored inside your infrastructure, under your retention rules, your access controls, and your naming conventions. 

That gives you something the traditional render-and-download flow never could: full control over the entire production workflow, end to end, without a manual handover in the middle.

Sounds very clean, doesn’t it?

Built for the way newsrooms work

This isn’t about replacing browser rendering. Both approaches have their place, and client-side rendering isn’t going anywhere.

If you need a video quickly and want it on your machine as fast as possible, browser rendering remains a great option. It also remains the right choice when you want manual control over exactly what ends up in the newsroom production system, such as reviewing the file yourself before it goes anywhere, or when the map is only one layer of a bigger edit and needs to go into After Effects or a comparable tool first.

If file size matters, if you need an MP4, MOV, or client-specific codec, or if you just don’t want your local machine involved in the rendering process, cloud rendering gives you another, more production-friendly option.

It’s another step towards making map production fit more naturally into the newsroom workflow: less manual handling, fewer bottlenecks, and more of the heavy lifting happening where it makes sense.

TL;DR:
Need speed? Render locally.
Need a production-ready file with specific format or codec requirements? Send it to SSR.

Mapcreator cloud rendering is available now, with rendered videos stored for 90 days.