Transcoding Enhancements within Telestream Vantage Set New Standards in Media Processing Technology Integration

Telestream makes it easier to integrate state of the art HDR, color processing, frame rate conversion and more into Vantage transcoding workflows

Nevada City, California(28 Sep 2020)

Telestream, a global leader in media workflow orchestration, media streaming and delivery technologies, has announced numerous significant transcoding capability enhancements to its market-leading Vantage media processing platform. These enhancements enable greater and easier integration of Vantage alongside third-party technology, and all of these capabilities (except the connector to Grass Valley Alchemist) are available in the cloud with Vantage Cloud Port.

The latest Vantage enhancements are significant in terms of the amount of capability that is being added for transcoding purposes. Since media companies around the world are using a wide variety of codecs and containers, the enhancements that have been added to Vantage mean these companies can have significantly more speed and automation in their transcoding workflows.

With Grass Valley HQX (formerly Canopus HQ/HQX), Vantage can now perform the task of transcoding acquisition formats to Grass Valley HQX, which are known as intermediate formats used during editing sessions. Vantage can also transcode Grass Valley HQX to delivery formats. Editors no longer need to waste time performing these tasks on their editing workstations – Vantage can automate these mundane tasks for them, so they can focus on the creative parts of the workflow.

For Colorfront, Vantage transcoding now provides customers access to Colorfront Engine advanced color volume remapping tools that use the Human Perceptual Model for multiple display mastering maintaining the original creative intent. Colorfront’s state-of-the-art color processing within Vantage brings plug-and-play simplicity, as well as a solution to today’s complex multi-source, multi-deliverable production needs.

And regarding Grass Valley Alchemist - for media companies that prefer Alchemist for high quality frame rate conversion, there is now a 3rd party connector within Vantage to create orchestrated workflows that include their technology. “Grass Valley are excited to provide our shared customers with improved workflow efficiency by having tighter integration with Vantage for our flagship media frame rate conversion product, Alchemist,” commented Martin Jolicoeur, Director Processing Product Management at Grass Valley.

Some of the other enhancements to Vantage transcoding capability include:

• FFV1 Encoding - FFV1 is a lossless, intra-frame video codec. The encoder and decoder are part of a free, open-source library in the project, FFmpeg. FFV1 is particularly popular for its performance regarding speed and size, compared to other lossless preservation codecs.
• Sony XAVC – Vantage now supports XAVC HD and HD Intra as well as XAVC 4K and 4K Intra.
• Automated interface to Harmonic Spectrum video playout servers. While Vantage has worked with this system for some time, Vantage is now able to prepare media files within automated workflows in the cloud, via Vantage Cloud Port.
• HDR10+ (Vantage already supports SDR/HDR conversions and HDR10).
• And also, support for AS-11, DVCPro and DVC Pro HD, AV1, Tachyon 9.

Vantage also offers enhanced, automated composition – no other transcoding solution is able to create and re-time video, audio, and captions and subtitles using a Composition Markup Language (CML) across so many automated workflows. Instead of performing repetitive editing tasks to change titles and graphics, for example, users can build compositions to programmatically get the job done. Compositions can be built to trim, segment, stitch, clip, overlay video, transition, cross fade, perform audio-overs, route video, add graphics, re-time and more. The benefit to the customer is they reduce the huge volume of repetitive media composition and editing tasks to a manageable set of automated programs.

“Vantage has become the de-facto standard media transcoding platform worldwide. No competing solution can do what Vantage is capable of with respect to format handling and transcoding,” commented Scott Matics, Senior Director of Product Management at Telestream. “Saving time is pervasive in the Vantage value proposition. Having all of these codecs, containers, connectors and integrations supported in Vantage has the value of keeping mundane transcoding tasks off of the to-do lists for editors and other media and entertainment personnel who deal with file-based media.”