Depth of Options
The options are very extensive and will take a lot of tinkering with them to find out exactly which looks work for your productions.
Before you start tinkering with the these adjustments you need to consider the end user of the video. What kind of download speed do they have? What types of screens will they be viewing the video on? Will it be viewed on a laptop or desk top? In a noisy environment or a quiet one? Will they be viewing it passively or actively?
Online video will never look as good online as it does in the editing suite. You need to figure out what your highest priorities are and use the adjustment options to find the best compromise. You also need to adjust the compression so that your video cuts through as much of the unavoidable noise as possible.
For example compressed video is almost always darker than the original, the colors are almost always under saturated, and the audio is almost always too low. These are all artifacts of the compression process. This where Episode’s options become the most useful to you. By having the ability to adjust saturation, video size, frame rate, audio levels, interlacing and so on you will get the best possible result. When you compress a movie you are essentially telling it which items are more important to you – video quality, frame rate, color, audio, file size. The results that come out from Episode’s render engine are right on the mark. In Episode pretty much everything is adjustable. (see still frame)
Providing multiple formats for your end user or application is very important. This is where the primary difference comes in between Episode and Episode Pro.
The possible formats you can compress to and from in the original Episode are extensive. For Mac users the ability to compress to windows media and AVI files is very important since most people out there are going to be using PC to watch you stream.
However, Episode Pro provides nearly every format you might need for preparing video to be posted to the internet, by giving you the additional options of higher end formats such as MXF, GXF, H.264 High Profile, DVCPRO HD as well as mobile phone formats. If you don’t anticipate needing to use these additional formats, then less expensive original Episode would work just fine for you.
Whether you go with Episode or Episode Pro, getting the optional Flash compression for either version of the program is really a must. Flash is quickly becoming the most used video formatting online. Now if you already have Flash 8 with the newest video compression codec, you might be asking, “Why do I need to use a third party software to compress Flash Video?” However, the ability to compress all the formats you need for your production from one render engine with the control of Episode/Episode Pro will save you both time and money in the long run.
One other difference between the two Episodes, is the fact that Episode Pro has the added ability that you can drop as many compressions as you want on to one video file. For example, if you need a single video compressed to .WMV, QuickTime, and MPEGII, you just drop as many presets as you need to on one video and it’ll all render out of the same que. You can continue to add videos and compression presets to your que, even after you have begun the render process.
Now, one feature I would like to see improved is where the files are sent to, so that you could pick and choose for separate formats. Currently, you can only choose where you want to send the compressed files once for each batch. It would be nice to have the option to send different files to different locations. I like to set up multiple renders for several projects and send them to different places, rather than distribute them later. This would be a nice touch up for release 1.5.
Performance
For a software based program, Episode and Episode Pro are both very fast. The render engine is not quite real time, but, compared to every other software based compression tool I have used, it beats them by a long shot. Now I was testing on a quad processor G5, which definitely improved my performance due to the fact that Episode is optimized extremely well for multi processor machines, helping the render time out a lot. Your results will vary depending on what system you have.
Episode works very smoothly in the background allowing you to continue working on other projects while you compress without noticing a loss of system resources. In the Pro version, if you are wrapping up the editing of several videos in FCP or After Effects, you can add these new videos to the que as soon as you finish them, allowing your workflow to stay incredibly stable.
