[Craig Seeman]

Episode is limited to 25 batches, Pro is unlimited. Basically Pro can be geared towards facilities with high volume.

[Craig Seeman]

I work for 3rd Planet Video, which does consulting for Flip4Mac (as well as other clients).

[Craig Seeman]

BTW here the product comparison between Episode and Pro.
https://www.flip4mac.com/episode_compare.htm
and this will give you more detail
https://www.flip4mac.com/episode_tech.htm

I’ve had a couple of jobs were I needed to create MPEG2 Transport Streams so that Pro feature is useful to me.

[Craig Seeman]

You can always move up to Pro if you need some of those rarer codecs like MXF. I have Episode Pro and it’s got great flexibility. Get the On2VP6 Flash option. It looks good but Episode does Flash 8 encodes relatively fast.

[Craig Seeman]

If you want to use Flash you really should buy the Flash 8 (On2 VP6) option for Episode. Flash 7 (Spark) will not look good at the same data rate.

Windows Media out of Episode should look in the same ball park as Quicktime. Make sure you’re encoding to Windows Media 9. Make sure you’ve updated to Episode 4.2.2 btw.

Quicktime will look good if you use H.264 but the user must have Quicktime 7 to play the file back. Many PC users, especially in the corporate environments, don’t have Quicktime 7. Both Compressor and Episode can do H.264 but Compressor 1.2 may not have all the features the current Compressor 2.3 has. You may want to upgrade your Final Cut Studio package while they still have the bargain upgrade price.

Also when you say “streamed” you REALLY need to know whether they’ll be serving it on a true streaming server or http. Encoding for streaming server requires different parameters (depending on the codec) than http “progressive download” (which people often call “streaming”). You may get better quality on your encodes with motion graphics source if you’re doing 2 pass VBR encodes for http progressive download.

[Craig Seeman]

Flip4Mac Studio series is good if you don’t need processing filters. It will work in Cleaner, Squeeze and Compressor though. If you’re going to go the compression app route then Flip4Mac Episode/Pro is a heavy hitter. You can even do Window Media Multi Bit Rate in Episode and I don’t think any other Mac compression apps support that.

[Craig Seeman]

Ed, There’s been a free update from Compression Master to Episode for a while (unless you’re using a very old version of Compression Master). Episode WM9 is very good . . . and fast. Flip4Mac does work in Cleaner 6.5.1 though to create WM9. Flip4Mac also works in Squeeze. There are less and less reasons to do WM9 compression on a Windows box (although still a few).

[Craig Seeman]

Flip4Mac web page back up but their tech support forum is still down.

[Craig Seeman]

Part of what a typical codec for web does, is estimate the motion (change) from frame to frame. If you change the frame rate you change the amount of motion between frames. The best way to do this is go back to the source and recompress. Personally I prefer encoding at source frame rates most of the time. If there’s a lot of motion in the source, the decreased frame rate looks poor in my opinion. If the source is “talking heads” though dropping to 15fps may be ok though. Keep in mind, cutting the frame rate in half does not necessarily cut the file size in half because the motion (change) from frame to frame is now increasing.

[Craig Seeman]

Odd. I’d be surprised that the academic version contains less fonts. Maybe someone else on COW with academic Final Cut Studio 5.1.x can confirm this.