Telestream Releases Episode 6 Video Encoding Software

Telestream, a leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, has announced the release of Episode 6, the only cross-platform, multiformat software encoder on the market that offers scalability from the desktop to a workgroup or server cluster.
Episode Version 6 brings industry-first One Click Clustering with integrated file sharing to content owners, professional videographers and post-production facilities. This powerful new feature allows users to easily pool resources and share encoding tasks across multiple computers in a mixed environment of PC and Mac computer. A new, intuitive user interface with graphical workflow builder simplifies the encoding process. New deployment capabilities in version 6, including automatic uploading to YouTube, enable greater audience reach.
Brent Kirsten, Owner and Creative Director at digitalcore, a San Francisco video production and post facility, said: "Setting up a cluster couldn't be easier. With Episode's simple clustering features, it's effortless to maximise our horsepower when we need it. We've been waiting for a solution like this for our SAN; it will save us hours of time."
Dylan Armajani, System Administrator at New York-based 24-hour lifestyle network, Plum TV agreed: "We love Episode 6 and plan to deploy it in all nine of our locations. It is an incredibly feature-rich and robust programme with a straight forward user interface that even novice users can operate with very little training. Within ten minutes of receiving the product, I had our watch folders delivering numerous different encodes: to our CDN for web playback, to our video playout servers for broadcast, and another straight to YouTube. From one watch folder I could push a single video to all of our various destinations."
New video format support includes WebM, the web media format, based on the VP8 open source video codec, as well as high-quality Main Concept H.264 and MPEG formats. Because of Episode's high-quality 10-bit processing, Telestream has been licensed to distribute the Apple ProRes codec, which enables native decoding and encoding in the Mac version of Episode 6 right out of the box.
New deployment capabilities allow users to automatically deliver completed content using standard network delivery protocols and upload content to popular video sharing websites like YouTube. All these new capabilities are easily accessible through the new user interface and graphical workflow builder, which allows users to visually create and view the steps in their encoding process. Video compressionist Jan Ozer describes the new user interface as "brilliant" in his Episode 6 video tour.
Episode is an all-in-one video encoder that provides extensive format support for post-production, new media, web and mobile encoding environments. Best-in-class video processing, full 10-bit support and hands-on control with frame-by-frame video preview allow users to generate excellent picture quality.
For time-critical workflows, parallel encoding and unique Split-and-Stitch technology allows users to distribute files across a cluster of Mac or PC servers or saturate the processing power of a single machine to achieve remarkable encoding speeds.
(KMcA)