Telestream, the leading provider of digital video tools and workflow solutions today announced that Episode version 6.5 multiformat encoding software is now available. Unveiled at NAB 2015, version 6.5 now includes support for closed captions, the latest formats, multi-bitrate encoding, and multi-track audio.
“Thousands of customers rely on Episode to process and deliver hundreds of thousands of hours of video monthly,” said Barbara DeHart, Vice President of Desktop Business at Telestream. “It’s important to us that Episode be stable, fast, and up to date with the latest technologies.”
Episode provides high quality, affordable transcoding for individuals and workgroups. Preserving the integrity of original content while transferring it between incompatible systems is a constant challenge for post-production professionals. Episode’s transcoding engine is designed for the entire production workflow – maintaining high quality files from the camera to edit and all the way to final delivery. Episode also provides built-in collaboration and clustering to easily join multiple Mac and PC machines together to provide affordable transcoding scalability.
“We’re excited to release Episode 6.5. The support for closed captions, multi-bitrate streaming, multi-track audio and new formats will help our customers take advantage of new technologies and build more complex workflows,” said DeHart.
“I’m very impressed with the new Episode 6.5. The new features are extremely useful and will continue to maximize our encoding efficiency while keeping our workflows smooth,” said Andrzej Kolakowski, beta tester from MPC.
New features in Episode 6.5 include:
Closed caption support
Episode 6.5 enables caption insertion with encoding and pass-through options, and supports CEA-608 and CEA-708 captioning standards as well as MCC and SCC caption formats. With federal regulations mandating captioning, this enables postproduction workflows to handle embedded captions easily.
Broadest support in its class for virtually any video and audio file format
Episode supports the widest range of formats in its class, allowing users to repurpose media for websites, mobile devices, television, archive, disk authoring and more. With version 6.5, Episode adds support for new formats including HEVC, XAVC, VP9, and MXF AS-11.
Multi-bitrate streaming support
Multi-bitrate streaming improves a viewer's experience by letting users deliver videos in the resolution and bit rate that best matches viewers’ connection speeds. With version 6.5, users will be able to easily encode and create packages for Apple HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and MPEG-DASH with a click of a button.
Support for multi-track audio
Featuring improved performance and stability, Episode 6.5 adds presets and filters to easily map multi-track audio channels -- rearrange audio tracks, change speaker assignments, and change audio formats and sample rates.
Image sequence support
Image sequences are now available directly from the Episode user interface, which provides an easy way to manage thousands of frames for 3D animation and compositing for visual effects. Users can step through the sequence frame by frame with the highest possible quality. It’s also possible to add multiple files from different sequences for multiple encode tasks.
Available in three versions with incrementally increasing encoding speeds and format flexibility, Episode, Episode Pro, and Episode Engine are all supported on Mac and PC platforms. Because Episode’s transcode engine is completely multi-threaded, multiple jobs can be processed in parallel, utilizing all available power from modern multi-core workstations. Episode Pro enables two concurrent jobs, while Episode Engine supports an unlimited number of parallel jobs, across multiple machines.
When encoding speed is critical, Split-and-Stitch technology, available in Episode Engine, enables distributed and segmented encoding for any supported format, across multiple clustered Mac or PC workstations. Episode’s built-in file sharing system automatically offloads work from one machine to another without any user assistance. Whether sharing encodes between processing cores on a single workstation or across a cluster of cross-platform machines, Split-and-Stitch enables the fast encoding speeds possible.
More information is available at www.telestream.net.
