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Rhozet Carbon Coder
At $4,995, Carbon Coder isn't for casual users. However, if your facility has outgrown the functionality that even three or four installations of Sorenson Squeeze can provide, or needs features or format support not provided in Squeeze, Carbon Coder should definitely be on your shortlist. The feature set and video quality are outstandinq, but it's Carbon Coder's performance that's really impressive.
Rhozet Corporation
www.rhozet.com
Price: $4,995
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
* Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon
* 2GHz CPU
* 2GB RAM
* 100MB free hard disk space
* DirectX 9.0 or later
* Microsoft Windows XP Professional or 2003 Server
* USB 1.1 or 2.0 port for USB Hardware Key
Rhozet's Carbon Coder is the ideal product for high-volume compression shops serving multiple video formats to multiple targets. At $4,995, it's 10 times more expensive than batch encoders like Sorenson Squeeze, but it supports many more formats, has more flexible automation options, produces the same quality or better, and is much, much faster during encoding. You can also further speed up your encoding by purchasing a network license to run a rendering farm.
Let me explain the company and product a bit, then discuss workflow, encoding quality, and performance.
Carbon Coder
Rhozet was formed by members of the Canopus ProCoder product group. They bill Carbon Coder as a "universal transcoding product," and the supported format list is indeed impressive-it includes MPEG-I, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, Windows Media, DV25, DV50, DVCPro, HDY VC-I, DPS, DivX, Flash, Real Video, QuickTime, AVI, ASF, MXF, LXF, GXF, sQ, Omneon Spectrum, and 3GPR In performing these encodes and transcodes, Rhozet offers the usual mix of video and audio filtering, along with deinterlacing, cropping, color correction, gamma correction, and other effects. Other niceties included inverse telecine, time-code burn-in, logo insertion, and metadata conversion.
You can run the Carbon Coder application directly or encode unattended in batch mode via watch folders. Rhozet offers a capture module for $495 that I did not test, and while the first year of maintenance and support is free, it's $795 per year thereafter. Note that Rhozet charges on a per-computer basis, not per CPU, so the software would have cost the same for our HP xw8400 Workstation equipped with dual-socket, quad-core processors as...