Increasingly, video finds itself destined for the web and mobile devices. Witness the popularity of YouTube, the Video iPod, and video-enabled cell phones. Simultaneously, video pros and end-users alike are making their own DVDs--soon, high-def DVDs--and grappling with format conversions. Transcoding has gone mainstream, but skillful use of professional software tools still separates great results from blocky, blurry, bloated files.

Transcoding software has matured and now produces a wide range of output formats, from web and mobile standards like MPEG-4, Windows Media, QuickTime, and Flash, to VC-1 and H.264 for next-generation HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs. For this roundup, I've collected the leading transcoders for Mac and Windows to compare their usability, performance, and output quality. I tested them on my MacBook Pro and Dell Latitude notebooks, both with similar Intel Core Duo processors. See sample outputs and benchmark tests here.

Compressor 2.3

Apple

$1,299 (component of Final Cut Studio)

DV Score:

Pros:
Fast performance. Easy distributed encoding. Excellent QuickTime, MPEG-4, iPod, and DVD support, including Dolby Digital and H.264 for HD DVD. Integration with Final Cut Pro.

Cons:
No built-in support for Flash or Windows Media. No intelecine, saturation, fade in/out, or audio filters. No watch folders. No metadata.

Bottom Line:
Great for transcoding among editing formats used by Final Cut Pro, bridging the gap between Final Cut and DVD Studio Pro, and producing QuickTime and MPEG-4 files for web and mobile delivery.

Apple built Compressor to expand encoding options for DVD Studio Pro and offer Final Cut Pro users a quick path to delivering files to the web and mobile devices. As part of the $1,299 Studio, Compressor doesn't compete head-on with $500 desktop transcoders. But its fast distributed encoding competes favorably against products costing thousands more, like Rhozet Carbon Coder and Telestream Episode Engine (see "Enterprise Solutions" sidebar), so long as you don't need the extra output formats and automation those high-end transcoders offer.

Click To Enlarge Compressor's tiny grey icons and text defy legibility. The Frame Controls offer advanced deinterlacing and scaling, but slow performance. Hundreds of presets for DVD, HD DVD, web, mobile, and advanced format conversions are included. Integration with Final Cut and DVD Studio Pro includes pass-through and editing of edit and chapter markers.

Usability ups and downs

Compressor's floating preview, batch, presets, and inspector palettes are straightforward, but their small, monochromatic text and icons aren't very legible.

The software has no intelecine option to restore 24p film sources; Apple suggests using Final Cut's Cinema Tools app, but that refused to process my DV source file. Likewise, the absence of audio filters is a nod to Soundtrack Pro. I'd prefer the convenience of intelecine and basic audio filters in Compressor.

The manual makes it clear that the motion-adaptive deinterlacing in Frame Controls is higher quality than the "legacy" Deinterlace in Filters. So why not consolidate them? While the Frame Controls produced clearly better results from standard-def interlaced sources, encoding times suffered.

Integration with Final Cut Studio is superb. Final Cut's Export via Compressor transfers your sequence directly without the hassle-and potential quality loss-of rendering an intermediate file in a compressed format like DV. Chapter markers from Final Cut are honored by and can be edited in Compressor, and they transfer seamlessly into DVD Studio Pro.

Deceptively comprehensive format support

Output support includes MPEG-1, -2, and -4, and formats for QuickTime exports. Those include high-quality H.264 for QuickTime and iPod, and 3GPP profiles for mobile phones. As one might expect, the iPod settings are elegantly implemented and bulletproof. MPEG-2 support includes two-pass variable bitrate (VBR) in SD and HD resolutions, plus Dolby Digital audio with 5.1 surround sound mapping. There's also AVC H.264 High Profile encoding for HD DVD.

Advanced format conversions are plentiful. Need to change 1080i HD to anamorphic DV? HDV to DVCPRO50 PAL? Done. Compressor includes over two dozen presets for common QuickTime-based editing formats.

Neither Windows Media nor Flash are built-in, but Compressor works with QuickTime export components like Flip4Mac WMV Studio and On2 Flix Exporter. Compressor does not make transport streams for broadcast, nor does it support third-party archival, NLE, or video server formats.

Performance and clustering

Compressor runs fast on Macs with multiple G5 or Intel processors. When you submit a job, it processes in the background, where you can watch its progress in Batch Monitor.

Compressor reaches astonishing speed if you have several Macs on a fast network or Xsan and use the included Qmaster cluster services. Then anyone can submit jobs to the cluster for processing. It's downright fun to watch Batch Monitor as the cluster divides and conquers tasks.

Conclusion

If you already own it as part of Final Cut Studio, you'd be remiss not to take advantage of Compressor for its high performance and excellent support of DVD, QuickTime, and MPEG-4. You can inexpensively add Flash 8 and Windows Media 9 with the Flix and Flip4Mac plug-ins, making Compressor a well-rounded competitor.

Cleaner 6.5.1 for Mac

Autodesk

$599

DV Score:

Pros:
High quality results, thanks to Goldilocks image preprocessing filters. Most reliable intelecine. Ideal source preview window. Good support for QuickTime and MPEG-4.

Cons:
Slow performance. Dated, modal user interface. Crippled iPod, Flash, and DVD encoding.

Bottom Line:
Cleaner remains great for eking out the best image quality, especially from interlaced and telecine sources. But its slow performance and limited support for some output formats make it unsuitable for high-volume workflows, or for those needing to produce a wide variety of media formats with one program.

Cleaner has suffered a disappointing series of too-little, too-late upgrades that haven't addressed much more than support for new output formats over the years. Version 6.5.1's modal, single-tasking interface and slow performance will frustrate users. As the only Mac product here that's not Universal Binary, it's much slower than the competition-taking from 8 to 20 times longer than Episode, for example, at similar encoding tasks.

Click To Enlarge Cleaner's Goldilocks filters, including flawless intelecine, produced the best-looking results. The source preview window (behind) has the ideal toolset, including easy zoom, aspect ratio, timeline, and visual crop tools, plus detailed source specs.

Good previewing and filters

Still, Cleaner has its strengths. Dated though it may be, the user interface is easy to grasp. The preview window has just the right information and tools to examine source videos carefully, crop visually, set aspect ratios and in/out points, and view properties.

Cleaner's adaptive deinterlace produces high quality results, and its reliable intelecine filter produced the best-looking results in this roundup. The rest of Cleaner's filters are spot on, down to sharpening that works like Adobe Photoshop's Unsharp Mask. Combined with its excellent previewing, Cleaner is still great for jobs where quality matters more than speed. I sometimes use it to make a filtered master for later encoding by other products, just to use its intelecine filter on problematic film sources with a broken 3:2 pulldown cadence.

Limited format support

Cleaner 6.5.1 added support for new output formats, including QuickTime H.264, iPod, MPEG-4 for handheld devices, and Flash video. Cleaner also works well with Flip4Mac (available separately) to make Windows Media 9 files.

But some formats are crippled. For instance, Cleaner includes an old version of Flix Exporter that's missing the On2 VP6 codec for Flash 8 and that's incompatible with QuickTime 7. H.264 encoding for iPod, limited to 320 x 240, disallows cropping, ignores in/out points, and disables filters. And DVD encoding doesn't support HD resolutions or Dolby Digital audio.

Slow performance

Since Cleaner is not universal binary, performance suffers on Intel-based Macs. Worse, Cleaner processes in the foreground, so you can't work while a batch is encoding. While you wait, at least you can watch the output preview with its detailed statistics. It's all so, well, retro.

Conclusion

Autodesk says it's serious about continued development of Cleaner. But considerable work is needed to bring it truly up-to-date. Even in its current form, though, the high quality preprocessing helps it produce better results than competitors like Squeeze. So Cleaner still deserves a place in any serious Mac compressionist's toolbox.

Cleaner XL 1.5

Autodesk

$599

DV Score:

Pros:
Advanced video and audio preprocessing. Fast performance.

Cons:
Broken H.264 encoding. No Flash 8 output. Poor-quality deinterlacing and intelecine. Confusing interface.

Bottom Line:
R.I.P., Cleaner for Windows. Engineering innovations at the expense of usability.

So stumped was I by Cleaner XL's job template metaphor, the transcoder was the only program in this roundup whose manual I had to open before I could encode something. But once I figured it out, I discovered a logic to Cleaner XL that engineering-types will appreciate.

Nothing like Cleaner for Mac

While Cleaner for Mac's roots date back to Terran Interactive's Movie Cleaner Pro from the early 1990s (which was cross-platform through version 5.x), Cleaner XL was all new in 2003. Initially, Cleaner XL improved performance, but it also featured a stupefying user interface that turned off loyal users. Nevertheless, Discreet-now a division of Autodesk-has left Cleaner for Mac alone, save for minor updates, and maintains separate development tracks for Mac and Windows to this day.

Click To Enlarge Once you solve the riddle of its job templates, Cleaner XL has powerful filters, a nice source and output preview window, and a modern job queue that encodes in the background. But its output quality and ease-of-use suffer by comparison to Cleaner for Mac-and several important formats, like H.264, Flash, and iPod, are poorly supported.

At startup, Cleaner XL presents you with a job window that has few options. It's not until you open a job template from the File menu that you find Cleaner XL's true power. You see, you must open a template that corresponds to your source file's video format (e.g., "Non-Square NTSC 4x3 Telecine Bottom Field First") and desired output format (e.g., "Windows Media Download"). Once open, you add a source file, and the template already includes filter and output settings that make a good starting point. Clearly, this is not intended for users who aren't already intimately familiar with the specs of their source video, but I'm sure Cleaner XL's engineers had good intentions.

Outdated, broken output formats

Two of the most important web and mobile device formats today, Flash and H.264, are poorly supported. The included Wildform Flix exporter lacks On2's newer VP6 codec for Flash 8. Cleaner XL uses Apple's QuickTime H.264 encoder, which failed with errors while I attempted to make an MPEG-4 file with the exporter's best-quality (multipass) mode, and produced visually degraded results when encoding a QuickTime MOV.

While I was able to produce Flash and H.264 output with Cleaner XL, quality suffered because H.264 was limited to single-pass mode, and Flash was limited to the older Spark codec from Flash 6. Fortunately, Windows Media works fine. Autodesk claims Cleaner XL 1.5.2 fixes the multipass encoding and H.264 bugs, but Flash support has not been updated.

Cleaner XL does have deep support for some hard-to-find input formats, such as DPX, Cineon, and OpenEXR, and output formats such as MPEG-2 with 4:2:2 (vs. 4:2:0) color space and all manner of still and sequenced images. It also has tight integration with other Autodesk programs like Smoke (reviewed on page 16), Flame, and Combustion.

Innovative filters, but mixed results

Cleaner XL has some unique and powerful video and audio filters, from Photoshop-like color curves to 5-band parametric EQ to variable ramp fades. Other expected filters like contrast, brightness, gamma, saturation, sharpen, and normalize all work well, but I had mixed results with the deinterlace and intelecine filters.

Although the intelecine filter restored my clip to 23.98fps and removed most telecine artifacts, like some competitors, it missed some interlaced frames in its output and produced alias artifacts on high-contrast diagonal edges. Surprisingly, Cleaner for Mac handled the same source flawlessly. Likewise, the adaptive deinterlace filter produced output with double, or ghost, images in areas of rapid motion from my HD 1080i runway fashion show clip.

On the bright side, Cleaner XL's monitor window made it easy to see the before-and-after results of filters while adjusting them, intuitively and in real time. And like Squeeze, Cleaner XL can encode and preview a short portion of your source clip to spot-check your settings before committing to a long job.

Click To Enlarge Cleaner XL's automatic adaptive deinterlacing mangled my 1080i sample clip, producing annoying double image artifacts. Cleaner for Mac had no such problem.

Performance and automation

Cleaner XL's job queue processes in the background, unlike Cleaner for Mac, so you can set up other jobs while it encodes your output files. The performance ranks with both the higher-priced Carbon Coder on Windows and speed-demon Episode on Mac.

Automation features include standard watch folders plus command-line scripting with access to Autodesk's included backburner rendering engine, all features touted by higher-priced competitors.

Conclusion

At its core, Cleaner XL seems engineered, not designed. As a geek, I can appreciate its efficiency, and I see how over time I could become accustomed to its idiosyncrasies. But it's hard to imagine why such technological advances required leaving behind many of the still best-in-class usability features of the former Cleaner 5 for Windows. Unfortunately, Cleaner XL has other, more serious problems with its format support and output quality that make it impossible to recommend.

ProCoder 2.04

Grass Valley

$499

DV Score:

Pros:
Good MPEG-2 encoding for DVD. Stitching. Color space conversions.

Cons:
No MPEG-4, Flash, iPod, H.264, or Dolby Digital output. No intelecine filter. Clumsy interface. Annoying dongle.

Bottom Line:
For DVD authors, ProCoder is among the best MPEG-2 encoders available for any price. But limited support for key output formats and a frustrating user interface reduce its appeal.

ProCoder cribs a little too much of its user interface design from Microsoft's free Windows Media Encoder. That is, it focuses on process instead of your media. There's even a separate step-by-step Wizard application-clear evidence its designers recognize how unintuitive some may find the interface.

On the bright side, previewing source videos is straightforward, as is setting in and out points, though there are no zoom or aspect ratio controls in the preview window. Visual cropping is possible only after applying a crop filter. As in Squeeze, you can manage filters separately from compression settings, allowing you to logically apply them in combination. But you must apply and adjust each filter individually, which is cumbersome.

ProCoder features all of the important video and audio filters except intelecine for restoring film sources to 24p for clean computer playback. Ironically, ProCoder includes a pulldown, or telecine, filter to convert 24p film sources to NTSC-something one would seldom need when outputting any format ProCoder supports (even MPEG-2), since DVD players do it on the fly.

Dated format support

Last updated in 2005, ProCoder lacks important new output formats like H.264, iPod, and Flash, though you theoretically could find limited support through QuickTime export components like On2's Flix Exporter, available separately. However, I was unable to produce MPEG-4 or Flash files this way. Despite installing Flix, Flash did not appear in ProCoder's list of QuickTime exporters, and while I was able to select and adjust settings for Apple's MPEG-4 exporter, ProCoder appeared to encode but produced no file. Note, however, that ProCoder is due to be rev'd at NAB 2007.

MPEG-2 encoding for DVD is ProCoder's strong suit, and it produces excellent results with deep control. However, Dolby Digital audio encoding is absent, so DVD authors will find ProCoder's option to create VOB files for direct DVD burning of limited use.

Conclusion

Until it adds support for important formats like Flash, H.264, and iPod, ProCoder has limited appeal. It's a fine tool for making Windows Media and MPEG-2 for DVD, though lack of Dolby Digital audio limits the latter. Regardless of format support, ProCoder earns black marks for its user interface, which makes applying, adjusting, and previewing filters cumbersome, along with its lack of intelecine.

Carbon Coder 2.05

Rhozet

$4,995

DV Score:

Pros:
Deep format support, including web, mobile, broadcast, and postproduction file types. Fast, high-volume encoding. Customizable XML-based API.

Cons:
Expensive. Same clumsy interface as ProCoder. Annoying dongle.

Bottom Line:
Essentially an enterprise version of ProCoder. Media companies wishing to build an automated, high-volume transcoding workflow will appreciate its speed, extensible API, and support for virtually all input and output formats.

ProCoder Pro would be a more fitting name for Carbon Coder. Rhozet, a spinoff from Canopus, still acts as the ProCoder development team for Canopus/Grass Valley (which retains rights to the ProCoder name).

As such, the programs share a lot of DNA. But Carbon Coder targets high-volume workflows by adding broadcast format conversions, robust automation, a customizable API, faster batch processing, and distributed rendering support-albeit at a price 10 times higher than ProCoder.

Click To Enlarge While Carbon Coder generally produced excellent output, its intelecine filter tripped up numerous times during my 60-second NTSC sample clip of a commercial originally shot on film at 24 fps.

Same user interface as ProCoder

While those upgrading from ProCoder to Carbon will take comfort in the common interface, it's a shame Rhozet didn't see fit to add professional UI features-like zoom and aspect ratio controls in the preview window, a slider for previewing filter effects, or more nuanced batch management that would allow, for example, different output targets for each source video.

At least some features work intuitively, like Source Preview, which lets you easily play, crop, and mark in and out points, as well as view detailed source properties.

Vast format support

Carbon Coder covers all the bases in formats, from web and mobile standards such as WMV, MPEG-4, QuickTime, 3G, and iPod, to DVD standards such as MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, and Dolby Digital, as well as editing and archival formats like MXF, HDV, and GXF. For Flash, you must separately purchase the On2 Flix Exporter, which is then available in Carbon Coder as a QuickTime export component.

Carbon Coder produces SD and HD transport streams for broadcast, with either MPEG-2 or H.264 codecs. And it ingests most formats it outputs, making it a true anything-in, anything-out transcoder for complex postproduction workflows.

Advanced filters and performance

Though tedious to access-because users must add and edit each filter individually-Carbon Coder offers a great deal of control. Filters include everything in ProCoder, plus intelecine, timecode burn, XML titler, and broadcast color safe. Advanced framerate conversions between PAL, NTSC, and film are available, too.

Optimized for PCs with multiple CPUs, the app can process multiple jobs concurrently-ideal for having watch folders to which many users contribute files for encoding. My limited tests didn't fully exploit its capabilities, but Carbon Coder was easily among the fastest in this roundup.

As we were going to press, we learned Carbon Coder 2.5 will be announced in time for NAB, and will add support for Panasonic P2, Sony XDCAM, and Avid MediaStream formats, as well as Dolby AC-3 audio.

Conclusion

As a high-end desktop transcoder, Carbon Coder pales in comparison to Episode Pro, which costs far less, is easier to use, and matches or exceeds most of Carbon's output formats, filters, conversions, and performance. Where Carbon Coder proves its worth, though, is for large workgroups looking to tap into its XML-based API to customize a complex, high-volume encoding workflow. In this respect, it has no peer.

Squeeze 4.5.4

Sorenson Media

$249-$799

DV Score:

Pros:
Cross-platform. Elegant user interface. Complete Flash video support, including SWF skins. Powerful batch processing and automation.

Cons:
Poor image preprocessing and limited filters. No Dolby Digital, VC-1, or H.264 High Profile encoding for DVD.

Bottom Line:
Good support for web, mobile, and basic DVD output combine with a friendly, cross-platform user interface to make Squeeze a good all-around choice for novice and intermediate users.

This evolutionary upgrade of Squeeze 4 (Reviews, Sept. '05 DV) improves performance-especially on Intel-based Macs, for which Squeeze is now Universal Binary-and mildly freshens the user interface with conveniences like aspect ratio control and a "format constraints" menu. It also supports new codecs, including On2 VP6 for Flash 8 and Apple H.264 for iPod.

PowerPak ($649 Windows/$799 Mac) includes the On2 VP6 codec for Flash 8 and-in the Mac version-the Flip4Mac WMV Studio Pro plug-in for Windows Media. Squeeze Suite, without those extras, fetches $499; a Flash-only version is $249.

Click To Enlarge For sources that require intelecine or deinterlacing, Squeeze's output, left, suffers compared to Cleaner's, right. Notice the aliasing on the diagonal edges and the clarity of the superimposed text. Squeeze does a better job with high-quality progressive and HD sources.

Elegant, cross-platform user interface

Squeeze is the only cross-platform product in this roundup, and what's more, you can freely download both versions and use your serial number with either-a real boon if you encounter source files that use codecs unique to Mac or Windows.

Squeeze's attractive user interface is well-organized. It's divided into panes for Input, Filters, Compression Settings, Preview, and Batch. The separation of filter presets from compression settings makes it easy to apply them in combination, saving time.

The preview window has clear playback, zoom, and-new in Squeeze 4.5-aspect ratio controls. The quick preview button encodes 1-5 seconds to spot-check your settings before starting a long batch. The preview slider shows the effect of applied filters, and you can crop visually.

Batch setup is nuanced, with a tree that lets you build and manage complex jobs, applying filters and settings at any level. Watch folders, set up like any other job, can have multiple outputs and filters associated with them. As jobs process, you can set up others.

Squeeze automates workflow with Optional Tasks like copying output files to multiple destinations-including FTP servers-or sending output to other applications such as iTunes.

Click To Enlarge Squeeze's attractive interface is easy to use, and its batch tree is the most powerful and nuanced. The preview window has excellent aspect, zoom, crop, and timeline controls. A preview range button encodes 1-5 seconds around the current play head position to spot-check settings before starting a long encoding job.

Good output support, especially Flash

Flash encoding is robust and tightly integrated, with Spark Pro (Flash 6/7) and On2 VP6 (Flash 8) codecs present, both with two-pass VBR. Squeeze goes a step further with the ability to make SWF files with player skins: the transcoder includes 21 templates, as well as instructions on how to build your own.

Windows Media support is complete-even on the Mac, thanks to integration of Flip4Mac. MPEG-4 output includes presets for QuickTime-and H.264 for iPod, 3GPP phones, and Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP).

DVD support is less complete, because there's no Dolby Digital or multichannel audio. And though HD DVD and Blu-ray presets are included, they use high-bitrate MPEG-2, not the advanced VC-1 or H.264 codecs those formats need for best efficiency. You'll find setup of the slow-running DVD disc burning app unintuitive.

Squeeze offers no access to QuickTime Export Components or QuickTime's native export dialog, so neither third-party nor QuickTime's own optional output formats (DV, AVI, AIFF, WAV, etc.) are available.

Click To Enlarge Squeeze's filters cover the basics, but below-average scaling and deinterlacing performance prevented it from matching the output quality of other products for less-than-pristine sources. The absence of sharpen, saturation, and any audio filters besides normalize is disappointing.

Poor image processing

Squeeze's image processing proves to be subpar, and its limited set of video filters lack deep control. The basic deinterlacing filter produces results with less detail than competing transcoders, and Squeeze's auto setting wasn't reliable for me. The intelecine filter discards fields even on progressive frames, visibly reducing detail and causing ugly aliasing on high-contrast diagonal edges. Scaling is soft, and the lack of a sharpen filter hampers corrective attempts. Saturation and audio volume filters are sadly missing.

As a result, Squeeze performed poorly in subjective quality tests, though the difference was less apparent with output from pristine HD sources than from interlaced or telecine DV NTSC files.

Conclusion

Squeeze may lack sophisticated preprocessing, but it stands as the easiest-to-use and most well-rounded transcoder, with the best Flash support. Available with feature parity on both Mac and Windows, Squeeze is good for those who prefer the simplicity of using one tool to make files for web, mobile, and DVD delivery.

Episode 4.2.2

Telestream

$395-$995

DV Score:

Pros:
Broad format support. Fast performance. Depth and breadth of filters offer fine control and produce great-looking results. Built-in Windows Media encoding with MBR support.

Cons:
Source preview lacks audio playback and crop tool. No watch folders or workflow automation.

Bottom Line:
Despite its frustrating source preview window, Episode delivers the goods that matter: quality, control, speed, and support for virtually every format. At $495 for Episode with Flash, it's also the best value here.

Episode formerly existed as Popwire Compression Master (see Reviews, April '05 DV), but Telestream, maker of the Flip4Mac, acquired the Swedish company Popwire in 2006 and rebranded its app.

Since then, the user interface has matured; format support has expanded; and performance was optimized for Macs with Intel processors. Episode ($395, plus $100 for Flash 8 video) is all you need for every modern web and mobile device format. Episode Pro ($795, plus $100 for Flash 8 video) supports MPEG-2 transport streams plus production and archival formats like MXF, GXF, and DPX; it also integrates with Episode Engine for server-managed distributed encoding (see "Enterprise Solutions" sidebar).

Click To Enlarge Episode outputs remarkably clean H.264, Flash 8, and Windows Media files, seen here together, thanks to Flip4Mac and Perian, which allow QuickTime to play WMV and FLV files. Episode was also among the fastest performers.

Preview window limitations

Episode's preview window has simple playback and timeline controls. Source, Preview, and Encoded tabs toggle among views of the original, filtered, or finished output, and the Preview tab updates in real time as you adjust applied presets in the Settings Editor.

However, the preview window's Source tab lacks audio playback, visual cropping, and aspect ratio control, displaying nothing beyond the source video's file name. How are you supposed to know if there's audio? Full-featured encoding tools like Episode shouldn't force you to open source files in external media players for basic info like format, resolution, fps, and so on.

Unparalleled format support and performance

No competitor, save Carbon Coder, supports more formats as thoroughly as Episode Pro. For example, it's the only Mac encoder that makes Windows Media MBR files for streaming. It also ingests most formats that it outputs, like Windows Media and MPEG-2, and it converts among production formats like .dv, .mxf, .avi, and .m2t (HDV).

More important, Episode has built-in support for the latest version of every essential web and mobile device delivery format, including WMV9, H.264 (.mov, .mp4, or .m4v), Flash (.flv or .swf), and all varieties of MPEG-4 profiles for 3G phones. For DVD, there's full support for Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and even VC-1 for HD DVD. Additional third-party formats get support via QuickTime export components.

Episode's impressive performance bests all Mac competitors and compares favorably with the much higher-priced Carbon Coder on Windows.

Click To Enlarge Episode has broad format support, as seen by the hundreds of well-crafted presets nested by format and workflow. Compression settings offer deep control, especially image preprocessing like resize and deinterlace. Unfortunately, the preview window has no audio playback or visual crop tool.

Powerful preprocessing filters

Episode has deep control for video and audio preprocessing. The deinterlace filter rivals Adobe After Effects and produces great-looking output. Bidirectional telecine conversions are included, though intelecine conversion didn't work as well as Cleaner on my sample clip. For audio, Episode goes beyond the basics with 5-band EQ and a channel mapper for up to 8-channel output.

The Settings Editor organizes its complex options under logical tabs and collapsible sections. Contextual help icons launch well-written illustrated explanations of all settings.

Batch processing is straightforward, though not as powerful as Squeeze's, since there are no job tiers. Filters are combined with compression settings, and there's no automated postprocessing akin to Squeeze's "Optional Tasks."

Click To Enlarge Episode's contextual help is easy to access, expertly written in plain English, and has superb illustrations to demonstrate the effects of its powerful filters.

Conclusion

For Mac users looking for deep control and support for every conceivable output format, Episode fits the bill. With the addition of better source previewing and workflow automation, Episode would be hard to improve upon.

Flip4Mac WMV 2.1 Plug-ins

Telestream

$29-$179

DV Score:

Pros:
Full-featured Windows Media playback and encoding on the Mac. Works with any program that imports or exports QuickTime.

Cons:
No multiple bitrate (MBR) output.

Bottom Line:
If you need to view or produce Windows Media on your Mac, Flip4Mac is essential.

Microsoft offers no Windows Media 9 encoder or SDK for Mac-only the format's source code for others to develop an encoder. From that source code, Telestream has built a series of WMV plug-ins that supercharge QuickTime to playback and encode Windows Media files.

Microsoft now distributes the free Flip4Mac WMV Player instead of its own defunct Windows Media Player for Mac, and Telestream sells four enhanced versions. Player Pro, $29, lets QuickTime apps like Final Cut import WMV files, while Studio, $49, adds basic presets for encoding WMV files. Studio Pro, $99, adds custom export, and Studio Pro HD, $179, includes advanced features like two-pass and HD encoding.

Click To Enlarge Flip4Mac WMV is an export component that encodes Windows Media from QuickTime applications, including Cleaner and Compressor. The Studio Pro HD version has advanced options like two-pass VBR and HD encoding.

Since Flip4Mac is universal binary, it performs well on Intel-based Macs. Except for encoding WMV9 Screen and MBR files, its support for Windows Media is complete. Sorenson Media bundles WMV Studio Pro HD with Squeeze Powerpak for Mac, whose WMV presets rely on it. Other Mac transcoders like Compressor and Cleaner are compatible.

In my tests, quality was similar to what I produced on PCs with similar settings, and Flip4Mac proved easy to use.

Nate Caplin manages webcasting and streaming media services for American Electric Power, based in Columbus, OH, and advises its video, web, and graphics departments on technology strategy. He's been crunching video for web delivery since 1995. Nate also consults and teaches video compression and streaming classes at MacWorld Expo and Apple's WWDC.