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Edit Review: Telestream Episode Pro 4

Apr 13, 2007 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Tom Patrick McAuliffe

Quick content conversion to the format of your choice.

The shooter wants a copy of the footage in DV for his demo reel. The client needs it in HD for broadcast or for high-definition DVDs. The marketing department wants the clips for use on the Web and for download onto video iPods and mobile devices for podcasts. The scoring folks would like high-quality MP3s. And the scriptwriters will take anything they can get.

Getting your content into all the various formats that today's media playback and distribution systems require can be a hassle. So Telestream has created a solution for Mac OS X users: Episode Pro version 4 ($895), a powerful encoding and conversion tool for today's digital media creator. With dozens of easy-to-use encoding presets, unlimited batch processing, and support for various professional video formats, the new software allows you to take a digital media file and repurpose it for delivery to multiple media.

Best of all, Episode Pro is fast. It's also the only Mac encoding solution to offer Intellistream MBR for Windows Media, in which multiple bit rates are included in the same file.

Telestream recently acquired Popwire and its Compression Master software. It was upgraded and optimized for Apple's newer multiprocessor machines and Mac OS X 10.4 and above. Now re-released as the Episode family (Episode, Episode Pro, and Episode Workgroup), the software was a hit at the 2006 IBC convention last September in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Telestream is offering all registered Compression Master customers a free upgrade to the new Episode software. (The regular version of Episode, which allows only limited batch processing and does not support certain formats such as HDV and IMX, is available for $395.) But with a price tag befitting a serious media production tool, is Episode Pro worth it? And is it as easy to use and as fast as Telestream claims?

The specs alone are almost enough to sell me on it. You can encode MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Windows Media 9, DV, and various QuickTime codecs (including support for H.264 for iPod and web delivery), and there's an optional Adobe Flash Professional 8 encoding module. There's also lots of video filters to process your clips. So that covers about 80 percent of what I need, and add to that support for high-end professional video formats such as MXF, GXF, H.265 High Profile, and DVCPRO HD.

Surround sound is fully supported, and Episode Pro includes audio filters to affect balance, mixing, and fade. There's even a five-band equalizer so you can tweak your audio files without needing to open another application.

A 30-day demo copy is available for download, so you can try it before you buy it. I downloaded the software from the Telestream website, which also allows you to purchase an unlock code to fully authorize the software. The 30-day demo is fully functional.

My install went smoothly, and before I knew it, my Apple PowerBook G4 was encoding and converting files. System requirements are somewhat high-octane. The software will work on my lowly 1GHz single CPU (768MB of RAM), but it is optimized for faster machines. When working with HD content, you need to have one of the newer dual-core 3GHz Mac Pro G5 machines or an Intel-based Mac with 1GB of RAM. But even on my slower, older machine, the software was peppy. One nice touch among many is that this software will run with both the older PowerPC chips as well as on the new Intel-based Macs, so when I upgrade to a new machine, I won't have to repurchase or pay any upgrade fee.

Episode Pro really could not be easier to use. The user interface is intuitive and supports the Mac's drag-and-drop protocol of transferring files. Simply select a source file from your hard drive, drag it to the main batch process window, and then open the Compression Settings folder and choose from 80 included preset settings that determine how your input files will be encoded. I could tweak any of the settings files or create custom ones from scratch.

It's a highly tweakable environment well suited to pros versed in the art and science of encoding professional-looking media files. But even the truly knowledgeable user will find a lot to like about the wealth of provided presets; those who are preset-minded will be spoiled for choice and able to acoommodate most media files in an optimized way. Heck, it will take a month of Sundays just to learn about all of them. You can encode an unlimited number of files with the batch-processing feature (I did 123 files at one time, and it took about an hour). Just set it up, push the button, and go have lunch. Easy. You can also prioritize your encoding and have the program do certain files first. One of the best things about Episode Pro is that in the preview window you can see what files will look or sound like before you encode or convert them. Even with the lowly 1GHz Mac laptop, the software achieved realtime or near-realtime playback performance.

Over the course of a month, I must have worked on more than 1,000 files, and Episode Pro always worked as it should. I did straight conversions from one file format to another and encoding using the presets, all with no problems and outstanding results.

I was most impressed that the developer has included extensive filters for both video and audio. One audio file exhibited a low rumble from a loud air conditioner, and another had too much treble. I used the software's high-pass and low-pass filters as well as the normalization tool, and the resulting converted MP3s sounded great.

When it came time to convert some raw DV and AVI video files, I worked with the software's video filters to achieve more-than-acceptable results. I corrected the clips and actually improved their look with the black-and-white restoration gamma correction and noise-reduction tools. I got creative with the contrast, fade, HSV, RGB, and sharpening filters. You can also resize, de-interlace, and fade your clips in and out, and I loved the timecode burn-in tool. The picture-on-picture watermarking tool let me release raw footage with a semi-transparent logo to keep it from being used publicly (well, at least not completely hijacked), which is useful. I was impressed not only that these tools and filters were included at all, but also that they worked so effectively and were well-integrated within the application.

The Episode Pro code is rock-solid, and I pounded on it repeatedly to try to get it to crash. I was successful only once, causing a few files to be cut short upon conversion. And remember that I was using the software on a 1GHz machine. (Minimum system requirements are just that, of course, but sometimes I like to push the limits to see how software programs operate in the real world.) With carefully optimized and well-tested codecs, filters, and extensive fine-tuning compression capabilities, Telestream Episode Pro provides users professional-quality media encoding with no hassle. Via multi-thread encoding technology, high throughput is achieved even on somewhat slower machines.

No matter your capabilities or budget, an outstanding media production is useless unless folks can view and hear it. To achieve that, it must be in a format that people can access. I've used most of the other format-conversion programs out there, but now only one is in my Mac toolbar: Episode Pro. It's designed to be future-proof, so expect new audio and video formats to be added as they emerge. Telestream has a strong history of issuing frequent maintenance upgrades to squash bugs and provide enhancements, like the recent release of version 4.2.2 of Episode Pro. After using version 4 for a month, I can say that this is software that any Mac media creator — and every serious one — should have in his or her toolbox.

While its price point is not chump change, Episode Pro will pay for itself in the long run. The benefits are tangible: avoiding conversion headaches, achieving outright time-savings, and opening possible new market opportunities for your digital content. (For the cost-conscious, there's also the lighter version, which costs less than half of what the Pro version does.) As today's digital media creators look to distribute their projects in multiple environments, Telestream Episode Pro 4 helps Mac users do it all quickly, easily, and elegantly.

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bottomline

Company: Telestream
www.telestream.net

Product: Episode Pro 4

Assets: Fast, numerous conversion templates, batch processing, zero learning curve.

Caveats: Costs more than competing solutions, Mac only.

Demographic: Every serious media creator on the Mac platform.

PRICE: $895

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.