Everything is now file based. Take your typical TV show for example, its available to you in HD in prime time. Hours later there are highlight clips on the network’s website, and the next day its also available on a web site like Hulu, three days later you can watch the same show on your smart phone and months later its available for you on DVD.
That one show will change video formats about twenty times. You will need a way to transcode your program to all these different formats. The best way to do this with no impact on your editing deadlines is to use a network transcoder.
When I see a post house get started they will do the transcoding over night on something like Sorenson Squeeze® or Apple’s Compressor®. People tend to not transcode files during the day because of the performance hit the editing will take. They will get less streams of playback and the
editing interface will start to get sluggish.
To get around this, people will chose to do their transcoding over-night. But what happens when over night transcoding fails? You come in the next morning and you have no deliverable for your customer, and even if you wanted to re-transcode you cant because it will take your editing down for the day.
This is the all too common nightmare scenario that tips people toward getting a network transcoder. Network transcoders do all the transcoding work that you shouldn’t be slowing your editing down with.
The first thing you will need to get a network transcoder is to have an editing environment that is networked so you are sharing your media through an Avid ISIS®, Facilis TerraBlock®, Rorke SAN.
In a basic setup you create a workspace on your networked storage that your network transcoder has write access to. You then need to give the transcoder read access to the rest of your media because the transcoder needs to see the media it’s going to transcode. This is especially true if you are working with Quicktime reference files or any other wrapper file format. You then set up a watch folder (or as some people call it a “hot” folder). You export the file from your editor to the partition with write access.
What your typical transcoder will do is watch the hot folder for a file to appear and then it will apply a transcode of your choosing. So for the most basic transcode lets take the following scenario….
We output a Quicktime file from our NLE (Media Composer, FCP, Premiere) and we need to change it to a Flash file for web delivery. From our NLE we export a Quicktime to the watch folder, our network encoder will see the file and automatically do the transcode to Flash and then post it to that same partition. Your network encoder does all the processing, so your NLE isn’t taken out for the day because you need some files transcoded.
Some of the products that will do background network transcoding are Telestream’s Vantage, Digital Rapids’ Transcode Manager, and Sorenson Squeeze Server.
There are also different ways that you implement these transcoders into your facility. Some of them will install onto a basic PC on your network, some will install onto a dedicated server, or some will even work on the cloud.
Some of the leading network transcoders are from Digital Rapids and Telestream.
The Digital Rapids Transcode Manager® enterprise-class transcoding software combines outstanding quality, intelligent automation and exceptional performance for transforming high volumes of media between dozens of acquisition, production, archive and distribution formats. Transcode Manager seamlessly scales from small transcoding ‘farms’ to large-scale, geographically distributed operations with hundreds of transcoding nodes. Transcoding tens of thousands of clips daily for many of the world’s largest media enterprises, Digital Rapids Transcode Manager streamlines and automates your transcoding operations, optimizing quality and delivering faster than real time performance while simplifying management and reducing effort and costs.
Transcode Manager supports a comprehensive range of compression and container formats for any application, from post production and archive to multi-screen distribution including adaptive bit rate delivery. Deeply configurable output parameters enable precise optimization for target devices and applications, while best-of-breed codec implementations deliver superior quality and exceptional performance. A Transcode Manager Server works in conjunction with multiple transcoding engines (nodes), intelligently allocating jobs for optimal throughput and resource usage.
What load balancing does is assign the jobs evenly across your servers. So if you get 10requests, 5 requests will be assigned to oneserver and 5 requests will be assigned to the other server. This is not only a feature of Vantage, but it’s also a feature that Digital Rapids’ Transcode Manager does as well. An incredible feature if your facility grows. Transcode Manager and Vantage will also do what is known as “intelligent load balancing” where if you have multiple encoders, it will choose the right encoder to do your transcode best.
A cloud-based transcoder also fi ts many post houses needs. Sorenson Squeeze Server can be deployed in your facility or on the cloud. Ever post a video to YouTube? That is a prime example of a cloud-based transcode. YouTube takes your video file and transcodes it to a nice lower bandwidth that will play in real time for you. Sorenson offers monthly plans based on how much transcoding you do. Think of it as something like your data plan for your smart phone.
So whether you get a dedicated machine to do your transcoding or if you send it up to the cloud, there are many ways to take the work of transcoding files off of your editing systems giving you more time to be creative.
Steve McGrath is a New Media Sales Engineer for HB Communications. He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, Fox, Versus, ESPN, Reuters, Pentagon, USDA, and many others. You can reach him at Steve.McGrath@HBCommunications.com