This guide shows how you can generate the following types of text:

Titles are brief phrases that capture the main idea of a video, making it easy to understand and categorize.
Topics identify the central themes of the video for effective categorization.
Hashtags are keywords that summarize a video, enhancing its searchability on social media.

You can generate one or more types of text in a single API call.

Prerequisites

To use the platform, you need an API key:

1
If you don’t have an account, sign up for a free account.
2
Go to the API Key page.
3
Select the Copy icon next to your key.

Ensure the TwelveLabs SDK is installed on your computer:

$ pip install twelvelabs

The videos you wish to use must meet the following requirements:
- Video resolution: Must be at least 360x360 and must not exceed 3840x2160.
- Aspect ratio: Must be one of 1:1, 4:3, 4:5, 5:4, 16:9, or 9:16.
- Video and audio formats: Your video files must be encoded in the video and audio formats listed on the FFmpeg Formats Documentation page. For videos in other formats, contact us at support@twelvelabs.io.
- Duration: Must be between 4 seconds and 60 minutes (3600s). In a future release, the maximum duration will be 2 hours (7,200 seconds).
- File size: Must not exceed 2 GB.
  If you require different options, contact us at support@twelvelabs.io.

Complete example

This complete example shows how to create an index, upload a video, and generate a title, topics and hashtags. Ensure you replace the placeholders surrounded by <> with your values.

1 from twelvelabs import TwelveLabs
2 from twelvelabs.models.task import Task
3 
4 # 1. Initialize the client
5 client = TwelveLabs(api_key="<YOUR_API_KEY>")
6 
7 # 2. Create an index
8 models = [
9 {
10         "name": "pegasus1.2",
11         "options": ["visual", "audio"]
12     }
13 ]
14 index = client.index.create(name="<YOUR_INDEX_NAME>", models=models)
15 print(f"Index created: id={index.id}, name={index.name}")
16 
17 # 3. Upload a video
18 task = client.task.create(index_id=index.id, file="<YOUR_VIDEO_FILE>")
19 print(f"Task id={task.id}, Video id={task.video_id}")
20 
21 # 4. Monitor the indexing process
22 def on_task_update(task: Task):
23     print(f"  Status={task.status}")
24 task.wait_for_done(sleep_interval=5, callback=on_task_update)
25 if task.status != "ready":
26     raise RuntimeError(f"Indexing failed with status {task.status}")
27 print(f"The unique identifier of your video is {task.video_id}.")
28 
29 # 5. Generate title, topics, and hashtags
30 gist = client.generate.gist(video_id=task.video_id, types=["title", "topic", "hashtag"])
31 print(f"Title={gist.title}\nTopics={gist.topics}\nHashtags={gist.hashtags}")

Step-by-step guide

Python

Node.js

Import the SDK and initialize the client

Create a client instance to interact with the TwelveLabs Video Understanding platform.
Function call: You call the constructor of the TwelveLabs class.
Parameters:

api_key: The API key to authenticate your requests to the platform.

Return value: An object of type TwelveLabs configured for making API calls.

Specify the index containing your videos

Indexes help you organize and search through related videos efficiently. This example creates a new index, but you can also use an existing index by specifying its unique identifier. See the Indexes page for more details on creating an index.
Function call: You call the index.create function.
Parameters:

name: The name of the index.
models: An object specifying your model configuration. This example enables the Pegasus video understanding model and the visual and audio model options.

Return value: An object containing, among other information, a field named id representing the unique identifier of the newly created index.

Upload videos

To perform any downstream tasks, you must first upload your videos, and the platform must finish processing them.
Function call: You call the task.create function. This starts a video indexing task, which is an object of type Task that tracks the status of your video upload and indexing process.
Parameters:

index_id: The unique identifier of your index.
file or url: The path or the publicly accessible URL of your video file.

Return value: An object of type Task containing, among other information, the following fields:

video_id: The unique identifier of your video
status: The status of your video indexing task.

Note

You can also upload multiple videos in a single API call. For details, see the Cloud-to-cloud integrations page.

Monitor the indexing process

The platform requires some time to index videos. Check the status of the video indexing task until it’s completed.
Function call: You call the task.wait_for_done function.
Parameters:

sleep_interval: The time interval, in seconds, between successive status checks. In this example, the method checks the status every five seconds.
callback: A callback function that the SDK executes each time it checks the status. Note that the callback function takes a parameter of type Task representig the video indexing task you’ve created in the previous step. Use it to display the status of your video indexing task.

Return value: An object containing, among other information, a field named status representing the status of your task. Wait until the value of this field is ready.

Generate titles, topics, and hashtags

Function call: You call the generate.gist method.
Parameters:

video_id: The unique identifier of the video for which you want to generate text.
types: An array of strings representing the types of text you want to generate. It can take one or more of the following values: ["title", "topic", "hashtag"].
Return value: An object containing, among other information, one or more of the following fields of type string: title, topics, hashtags.

Process the results

This example prints the generated text to the standard output.