Telestream’s Episode Engine Streamlines Video Encoding at Cannes Film Festival

For the third consecutive year, all Web video encoding for the Cannes Film Festival (Festival de Cannes) will be handled by Telestream’s Episode Engine professional video encoding application.

Episode Engine was selected for the Festival de Cannes official website to replace multiple technologies that had previously been used to encode and deliver videos to multiple destinations. This year’s Festival is going on through May 26 in Cannes, France.

“I chose Telestream Episode Engine because it allows us to input watch folders at the start of the chain, process several videos simultaneously, and save files both to remote FTP folders and locally,” said Anthony Verpoort, video project manager for the Festival de Cannes official website. “In addition, I was able to link up all five Mac Pro computers using Episode Engine’s clustering capability to maximize processing power.  That has made a huge difference!”

As the official website for the prestigious film festival, Verpoort and his team receive film trailers and clips that must be converted to the proper format and encoded into six different resolutions and bit rates for online viewing and press download. Additionally, videos from TV Festival, which covers photo calls, interviews, press conferences and all the red carpets events, must be processed and put online promptly. All TV Festival content is produced in both French and original-language versions and encoded into three different compression resolutions and bit-rates.

“Episode Engine is a perfect fit for organizations such as Cannes, which need to process loads of content and quickly get it out in multiple resolutions, bitrates and language versions,” said Barbara DeHart, VP of marketing at Telestream. “Episode combines broad format support, automated workflow capability, and the ability to distribute the encoding among clusters of machines for maximum speed and efficiency.”

With Episode, Verpoort can take a 40-minute press conference video and compress it in six formats and uploaded in less than 30 minutes. Episode Engine speeds the entire encoding workflow, allowing Verpoort and his team to quickly get videos online and keep their viewers up-to-the-minute on what is happening at the Festival.