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Housed in San Francisco?s Presidio, Rough House Editorial (www.roughhouse.com) provides complete High Definition and Standard Definition post production services. Compression Group, a division of Rough House, was inspired by a passion to meet the demand for expertly produced digital media for a wide range of client needs. Compression Group is in a great position to work with video producers during the early stages of the production cycle. This enables them to walk a client through a lot of what-if scenarios and really tailor a compression workflow for individual projects to ensure optimum file output.
Need for Versatile Compression Capabilities
The main focus for Compression Group is versatility. They need to be able to adapt compression capabilities to a very diverse clientele. Many of the compression tools they were using were great at one or two things, but lacked the adaptability to be considered an all-around encoding solution.
A Flexible Solution
Compression Group chose Telestream?s Episode software application because it provides the variety of encoding solutions they needed for their clients. According to Kenji Hayashi, Executive Producer of Compression Group at Rough House, ?The depth of control Episode allows us to achieve for each compression job we perform is unrivaled in the industry. The preview mode is the best I?ve ever seen for this type of application, and I?ve tried almost everything out there.?
Compression Group currently uses Telestream?s Episode Pro desktop encoding applications for MPEG-4, H.264 and Flash encodes. However, as their business continues to grow they are looking into how Episode Engine, Telestream?s server-based solution, can help them increase efficiency and throughput. ?We?re really excited about the huge growth potential that Episode Engine represents to us,? said Hayashi.
Telestream?s Mac-based Episode Series features a wide range of standard definition and high definition video and audio file formats, optimized codecs, multi-thread processing, hundreds of filters and fine-tuning compression capabilities to provide superior picture quality and exceptionally fast conversion speeds. Episode Engine provides scalable expansion from a single server to a clustered server environment with distributed job processing across multiple servers to meet increasingly faster, higher-volume workflow requirements.
The Workflow
Compression Group is currently running Episode Pro on four dedicated compression workstations, running on either Apple Quad-G5 or Apple Mac Pro hardware. Five Final Cut Pro HD and five Avid Adrenalin HD systems, plus three motion graphics stations are all running on Mac hardware. Every workstation at the facility is tethered to the SAN via a fibre channel. Episode Pro is installed on four dedicated compression stations, also equipped with fibre channel.
Hayashi is responsible for designing all of the compression profiles on his MacBook Pro. These profiles are uploaded onto the server and distributed to all of the Episode stations. Typically, the source media is stored on the central storage, which is accessed by individual stations for compression. Files are saved to a centralized location on the internal server as they are being compressed.
Completed files go through a QC process and are delivered to the end-user using different methods, including DigiDelivery, an accelerated file transfer technology which is ideal for transferring large files over the Internet.
Source files generated from an edit session are generally delivered to Compression Groups as 8-bit uncompressed QuickTime files. However, some source materials are generated from a tape master and are typically ingested as uncompressed AVI (YUY2) using Digital Rapids? Stream Z HD board.
Efficient, Reliable Results
When asked how Episode is working for Rough House Editorial?s Compression Group, Hayashi said, ?Episode Pro gives us a reliable and efficient means for working with a variety of file types. In addition to the intuitive interface, it provides an amazingly useful preview mode with an array of preprocessing filters that actually work! Most importantly, though, it gives us the peace of mind that a job is done right the first time. The control that we can achieve over each aspect of the encode process allows us to really dial in a compression to a client?s particular need or application. With some software encoders you have to run a job and cross your fingers. With Episode Pro, we have full confidence in the quality of the files. We know that we can trust Episode to crank out beautiful files with impressively small footprints in a timeframe that meets or exceeds our clients? expectations.?
Future Expansion
Compression Group is looking forward to upgrading to Episode Engine and integrating Episode more with their entire facility?s workflow.
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