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Like old-time alchemists who turned base metals into gold, Elemental Technologies, Inc. converts industrystandard CPUs and GPUs into the hottest H.264 on-demand encoding box I've tested, with incomparable speed and quality that matches the best in the business. While there are some notable deficits, including limited output format support and subpar VC-I encoding performance, if you need a tool to accelerate your H.264-encoding, Elemental Server should be on the top of your list.
Speeds and Feeds
My test version of Elemental Server was equipped with two six-core Westmere-class Intel Xeon CPUs and two NVIDIA GPUs, each with 512 discrete processors. The unit runs Linux in 6GB of RAM and comes with a 500GB hard drive, two dual-gigabyte Ethernet ports, and an MSRP of $25,950.
File input support is extensive and includes most MPEG-I, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 containers and codecs, as well as multiple material exchange formats and both Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHD. On the output side, Elemental developed its own H.264 codec, fine-tuning performance for encoding on both GPUs and CPUs. As mentioned, however, format support is light in some areas. In terms of web distribution, Server can't produce VP6 files, though it does support VC-I and MPEG-2 in addition to H.264, and it can output all relevant adaptive streaming container formats plus manifest files, as well as UltraViolet .uvu files.
For intermediate formats, the latest version of Server can output ProRes, but not DNxHD, and output support for camera-related container formats and codecs is limited. If you need formatspecific support for one or more play-out servers, check for this early because Server is limited here as well, though it does produce CableLabscompliant MPEG-2 transport streams.
I asked Elemental members of management about their limited file support, and they explained that, as originally envisioned, Elemental Server was focused on producing files for adaptive streaming, since this was an emerging requirement that used relatively few file formats but involved massive numbers of output files. While the company is gradually expanding format support, it sees the product as a highly focused encoding engine, not a Swiss Army knife.
Driving the Beast
You operate Server via three components: presets, profiles, and jobs. Presets contain individual preprocessing and postprocessing options and encoding parameters, while profiles contain collections...