The Scenario
You are editing a composite video with 20 raw clips, all sourced from different contributors. The clips are listed in an Excel workbook — column A — with their CDN URLs. Before you build the timeline in Shotstack, you need to know which clips are which duration and at what resolution, because three of them were filmed in portrait mode and one was sent in the wrong aspect ratio that will break the composite.
The bad version:
- Take the first URL from column A, paste it into Shotstack's inspect endpoint via Postman, read through the JSON response, and write the duration, width, height, and frame rate into columns B through E by hand.
- Repeat for all 20 clips.
- Go back and manually compare the resolutions to find the mismatches before you figure out which clips need to be excluded or reshot.
You are supposed to be making editorial decisions, not transcribing JSON. By the time you finish manually inspecting 20 clips, you have spent an hour collecting data that should have taken two minutes.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the URLs in column A, calls Shotstack's inspect endpoint for each one, and populates duration, resolution, and frame rate directly into the workbook.
For each media URL in column A of my Excel table, call Shotstack's inspect endpoint and populate columns B, C, and D with the file duration, resolution, and format
SheetXAI iterates each URL in column A, calls Shotstack's inspect endpoint, parses the response, and writes the values into columns B, C, and D.
What You Get
- Column B: duration in seconds for each clip.
- Column C: resolution as a combined value (e.g. 1920x1080) or split across columns if you ask.
- Column D: file format or frame rate, depending on how you phrase the request.
- Any URL that Shotstack cannot inspect — unreachable or unsupported format — gets a note in column B rather than a blank row.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some URLs require authentication headers to access
Eight of the 20 clips are in a restricted bucket and need a bearer token to be inspected. The token is in cell G1.
Inspect each media URL in column A using Shotstack — for rows marked "restricted" in column F, pass the token in cell G1 as the bearer auth header — write duration, width, height, and frame rate into columns B through E
You want to automatically flag clips that do not match the target resolution
Your target is 1920 by 1080. Any clip outside those dimensions needs a flag in column F.
Inspect each URL in column A using Shotstack and write duration, width, height, and frame rate into columns B through E — then in column F write "mismatch" for any row where width is not 1920 or height is not 1080, and "ok" for rows that match
Some entries in column A are notes or filenames, not actual URLs
The handoff workbook mixed in project notes and clip filenames alongside the CDN URLs.
Skip any row in column A that does not start with "http" and mark it "not a URL" in column B, then inspect all valid URLs using Shotstack and write duration, width, height, and frame rate into columns B through E for those rows
Validate URLs, inspect all valid clips, flag resolution mismatches, and summarize in one prompt
Skip rows in column A that are not HTTPS URLs and mark them "invalid" in column F, inspect all remaining URLs using Shotstack and populate columns B through E with duration, width, height, and frame rate, flag any clip where width is not 1920 or height is not 1080 with "mismatch" in column F, and add a summary at the bottom showing how many clips passed and how many need review
The reason to combine the validation and flagging: the editorial decision about which clips to include is downstream of the inspection data, and you want all of it in one pass.
Try It
Open your footage URL workbook and Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to inspect every clip in column A through Shotstack. The metadata will be in the workbook before you open your timeline editor. See also: Ingest media files from your workbook into Shotstack and the Shotstack overview.