Posted by Derrick on October 4, 2010 under Industry News | 
Sorenson Media has announced the immediate availability of Sorenson Squeeze 6.5, which adds greater encoding, publishing, pre-processing and filtering functionality to the industry-leading online video encoding product. The Squeeze 6.5 update is free to current Sorenson Squeeze 6 users.
“With Squeeze 6.5, the industry’s best encoding solution just got better,” said Randon Morford, director of product management for Sorenson Media. “Squeeze users can now enjoy the most effective means ever for publishing video directly to the cloud as well as top-quality HD decoding and encoding capability. This set of user benefits is continued evidence of our commitment to delivering the tools and services that our customers need.”
Among the new capabilities in Sorenson Squeeze 6.5, is the ability for the first time to decode the AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) format. AVCHD records high-definition video to DVD, hard drives, or flash memory cards as .m2ts, .mts, or .m2t files and is the most common recording format for high definition video cameras at the prosumer and high-end consumer market.
Other significant benefits of Sorenson Squeeze 6.5 include three new filters: enhanced de-interlacing, image rotation and optimized color conversion. The new deinterlacing filter works automatically as a default setting to increase encoding quality and speed and is faster than any previous version of Sorenson Squeeze. Image rotation improves video capture capability in mobile devices by converting portrait orientation to landscape, while encoding speed is further increased through optimized color conversion in Sorenson Squeeze 6.5.
New publishing capabilities have also been added. The software now has the unique ability to publish encoded video content directly to users’ Amazon Web Services S3 accounts. This capability brings significant benefits to enterprise users and small-to-medium companies who use the AWS cloud to manage and distribute their videos across the Internet, and builds on the software’s ability to publish to a variety of locations, such as the Sorenson 360 online video platform, YouTube or an FTP server.
Posted by Derrick on September 29, 2010 under Industry News |
Telestream, a leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, announced 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 computers. 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.
“Setting up a cluster couldn’t be easier,” reports Brent Kirsten, Owner and Creative Director at digitalcore, a San Francisco video production and post facility. ” With Episode’s simple clustering features, it’s effortless to maximize 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 concurs, “We love Episode 6 and plan to deploy it in all nine of our locations. It is an incredibly feature-rich and robust program with a straight-forward user interface that even novice users can operate with very little training. Within 10 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 which can be found on StreamingMedia.com.
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 allow 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.
“With Squeeze 6.5, the industry’s best encoding solution just got better,” said Randon Morford, director of product management for Sorenson Media. “Squeeze users can now enjoy the most effective means ever for publishing video directly to the cloud as well as top-quality HD decoding and encoding capability. This set of user benefits is continued evidence of our commitment to delivering the tools and services that our customers need.”
