By Yuval Kossovsky, December 7, 2006
Episode Engine Pro is the server companion and workflow-enabling software to Episode Pro. I had used a previous release of this software from Popwire-which has since been acquired by Telestream and the software rebranded Episode-as the back-end transcoder for a music streaming system and was curious to see how it had evolved.
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Many jobs can be executed on a single machine from the Engine Monitor tab. The setting is global, so if you have a 10-machine render farm, setting the number of jobs at two will enable each of the 10 machines to process two files simultaneously.
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Setup and use
Installation is easier in this latest version-just double-click on the installer package and the software is all set up to run. I installed the version for the standalone server. There is a different package if you are installing the software on a distributed node, but the process is the same.
After the installation, I went to the system preferences and opened the Episode Engine Pro preference pane, which contains most of the configuration settings for Episode Engine Pro.
The preference pane for this version has five tabs, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) support is the new feature. In the General tab, I set a password for the Episode Engine Pro monitoring software, which we will explore a bit later. You can also set how many jobs can be executed on a single machine from this tab. The setting is global, so if you have a 10-machine render farm, setting the number of jobs at two will enable each of the 10 machines to process two files simultaneously. This tab also lets you indicate how much log data to keep before overwriting.
The Path Setup tab is where you set the path for input and output folders. Unless you're a roll-your-own kind of UNIX admin, don't mess with the engine root path. Files are to be put in subfolders of the watch folder, not at the root of the watch folder, and only in one sublevel from the root. There is no support for nested folders, and therefore, the encoding drops cannot mirror many storage system structures.
You obtain codecs from Episode Pro (the client) and put them in the watch folder. Any media dropped into the folder will be encoded in each of the formats contained in the folder, written to the output folder, and then deleted. The codec settings remain. Note: Even if you put a Flash output codec in the folder and have a Flash output license for Episode Pro, if you've not loaded the Flash option license in Episode Engine Pro, then Flash output will be skipped.
Episode Engine Pro has support for linked files, but a simple alias will not work-you must do a terminal-based "ln" command. The advantage of doing this is that the source file is not deleted; only the hard link is removed from the watch folder. If your workflow requires encoding on the fly or if you want the option to pull a master from the digital asset management (DAM) system encoding, then scripting this option is the way to go.
You can set the location of the /tmp folder to run on a storage area network (SAN) or storage location other than the boot drive. Take advantage of this option if you can, because your temp files should not be on the boot drive.
The First Aid tab allows you to check the permissions on the various components of the Episode Engine if another software installation or overzealous "chmod" command locks it up.
Episode Engine Pro provides the option to manually remove temp files, though I wish the temp housekeeping could be set to delete after a certain cache size. For automated houses, you'll need to set up a command-line temp cleaning to be executed as a cron job.
Licenses for Episode Pro and Episode Engine Pro are delivered via XML files and are loaded through this GUI. You do this for all four of the license options: the Engine software, Flash output, high-availability, and split-and-stitch.
Professional features
Episode Engine Pro offers a few features that many shops find critical to support their workflow.
Remote management SNMP. A new feature in Episode Engine Pro allows you to monitor the systems with a standard SNMP monitoring package. Larger IT shops that have many devices under management will appreciate the ability to include Episode Engine Pro in their existing monitoring workflow.
Failover monitoring. Another new optional feature in Episode Engine Pro enables failover in the master nodes, something an automated shop or broadcast entity will find very useful. This feature functions just like failover nodes in a network cluster, where an IP address is assigned to a DNS name, and then each of the nodes answers for that address. The software prevents the failover node from engaging until the primary node has gone offline.
Conclusion
Episode Engine Pro and Episode Pro are fantastic packages for any situation where you want to enable workgroup and automated workflow. For automatic transcoding to multiple formats with simple pickup and drop-off folders, this is a fantastic solution. The advanced capability of Episode Engine Pro makes it worthy of an enterprise production workflow environment.
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