Smoke & Mirrors Purchases Digital Rapids' StreamZ Encoder

Smoke & Mirrors, the internationally renowned post-production company, has purchased Digital Rapids’ StreamZ encoder, to add to the four units they already have in operation at their London offices.
Providing a wealth of experience and knowledge in full service post-production, all Smoke & Mirrors’ sites are fully networked, enabling facilities to share resources and expand local capacity.
Following increased requests from clients to see work in progress digitally, both online and via DVD, Smoke & Mirrors looked for a solution. With primary input and output formats of MPEG, QuickTime and Windows Media, most software-based products were too slow and so they looked for a hardware-empowered solution that would fit their demanding turn-around times.
The StreamZ units have seamlessly integrated into their video and IP networks, leading all their encoding requirements. Principally they deliver work in progress for clients, varying from low res web encodes, to higher quality encoding for DVD. They also produce broadcast deliverables such as 25/50Mbit I-frame MPEG.
According to Penny Verbe, CEO, Smoke & Mirrors: “We chose Digital Rapids StreamZ primarily for the ability to encode in real time and the superior quality of the encoding produced. StreamZ is essential to handling work in progress, allowing us to meet increasingly tight deadlines. We believe that this area of our business will continue to grow and have recently installed further systems in our New York office.”
StreamZ encoding solutions combine powerful hardware for video and audio capture and pre-processing with the intuitive Stream software, delivering real-time, multi-format media encoding, transcoding and streaming. The advanced, hardware-based video processing features – including motion adaptive de-interlacing, scaling, filtering, and 3D motion-adaptive noise reduction – enable optimum quality and the most efficient use of bandwidth in the compressed result.
Digital Rapids is a leading developer of professional hardware and software solutions for video ingest, encoding, transcoding, protection, streaming, and delivery.
Digital Rapids offers solutions that scale from individual applications to enterprise and global workflows, with the proven expertise to help our customers maximize their productivity and the value of their content in the evolving digital media market.
(DS)