MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA - Optibase (www.optibase .com), provider of digital video encoding and streaming solutions, announced installation of its recently launched MovieMaker 200S for Macintosh MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding technology at Toronto's CFA Communications, one of the largest DVD production facilities in Canada.
The full-service communication company is using Optibase's MovieMaker 200S Publisher together with Apple's DVD Studio Pro 3.0 to gain efficiencies for its high-volume DVD encoding and authoring environment.
Since adding the new encoding workstation, CFA reports saving up to three hours off the processing time required to produce an entertainment DVD. CFA is running its MovieMaker 200S Publisher board, comprising Optibase MPEG encoding hardware on an Apple Power Mac G5 workstation with a dual-2GB processor and a gigabyte of RAM.
"To improve our efficiency, especially to support more home entertainment-type work, we needed to cut time on video in and reduce the overall compile time of our titles," said Cliff Rawnsley, managing director/producer, interactive and video production Services, CFA Communications. "With our busy workload, we knew crunching media in any other fashion was not practical, so an all-in-one system with hardware-based encoding was our mandate from the start. That's why we were happy to find the Optibase product, which complements our DVD Studio Pro authoring capabilities and allows us to leap into a whole new realm. It's exciting to have this combined Optibase/DVD Studio Pro solution in the building after just a week of real-world use, we're already seeing major productivity gains."
Already an Apple content creation customer, CFA added the Mac-based Optibase encoding component following research by CFA's chief engineer, Kwan Wong. Using the new setup, which is highly expandable, CFA can take in video information and very quickly have high-quality encodes for DVD authoring. This represents a vast improvement over alternative methods for the new Apple system, which would have required CFA to do an uncompressed capture or wrangle with a variety of digital video compressions and then process the media to MPEG-2.
CFA currently operates nine full-up DVD production workstations, The company completes everything from catalog DVDs for major movie distributors to titles for individual library owners. CFA also services a corporate clientele for presentation DVDs, e-learning pieces and other media products.