News

Canopus Debuts ProCoder Station Render Farm (14/4/2005)

ProCoder Station Render Farm is designed for high-volume transcoding

Canopus Corporation, a leader in digital video production and encoding solutions, will unveil ProCoder Station Render Farm next week at NAB 2005 in Las Vegas (booth SL325). ProCoder Station Render Farm is a network-based encoding solution that combines speed and flexibility into a powerful, streamlined encoding solution for production and broadcast facilities that have a high volume of transcoding jobs that need to be performed quickly. Using the companys powerful ProCoder video encoding software, the ProCoder Station Render Farm provides an efficient solution for the distribution of multiple transcoding jobs to multiple ProCoder Station Render Farm machines through a single unified management interface.

ProCoder Station Render Farm is the perfect solution for facilities that find their encoding system overloaded with a large number of queued tasks and need a more efficient solution to handle the workload. Through a shared storage device, ProCoder Station Render Farm processes multiple jobs concurrently on separate Render Farm machines, resulting in more jobs being processed. The system also provides for efficient allocation of jobs to the Render Farm machines. Each machine is monitored to assign incoming job tasks to the least-busy machine, reducing the possibility of one or two machines being overworked while other machines are idle.

By centralising and automating the demanding and complex load of encoding multiple projects, ProCoder Station Render Farm takes the headaches out of preparing video for distribution especially in high volume or large workgroup situations and boosts productivity tremendously, said Ray Brooksby, vice president of sales and marketing at Canopus Corporation. ProCoder software, with an established reputation for quality, speed and usability, is at the heart of this system and guarantees that video professionals are getting the best results for their encoded video.

CinemaNow, a leading video-on-demand distribution company, is using ProCoder Station Render Farm to help transcode titles for its expanding content library. With over 6,500 movies, TV shows and other video content in our library, there is a tremendous amount of transcoding that needs to be done at CinemaNow on a daily basis, said Aaron Evans, director of encoding operations at CinemaNow. We needed a solution that could handle multiple bit rates and multiple projects automatically. ProCoder Station Render Farm met our criteria and from a configuration standpoint, the browser-based interface couldnt be easier.

ProCoder Station Render Farm automatically encodes single or multiple sources to any number of output formats simultaneously and delivers the converted files to a LAN folder or by FTP, while creative work continues on the production system. ProCoder Station Render Farm features Canopuss high-quality, high-speed, industry recognised DV and MPEG-2 codecs. The Canopus DV codec provides the best picture quality preservation at the highest speed, while the MPEG-2 codec employs two-pass variable bitrate compression and advanced motion-estimation algorithms to provide the highest quality encoded video files. By taking advantage of Canopuss Scalable Technology architecture to harness the power of current computer systems, ProCoder Station Render Farm can transcode files faster than real-time in many cases and is entirely customisable and scalable.

ProCoder Station Render Farm fully supports HD resolutions (720p and 1080i) and can transcode between HD and SD resolutions and frame rates seamlessly. ProCoder Station Render Farm can also transcode between HD-compatible formats, including MPEG, DivX, Windows Media High Definition Video (WMV HD) and QuickTime. For added flexibility, ProCoder Station supports MPEG transport streams, including HDV and broadcast-compatible HD streams.

Availability

ProCoder Station Render Farm will be available as an option for Canopus' ProCoder Station from May 2005 through Canopus authorised system integrators.

www.canopus.com