Adobe Media Encoder - another hidden gem?

Production Values on PVC by Mark Chistiansen

You already own an amazing tool to optimize all kinds of video output and streamline your workflow.

Suppose you wanted a perfectly useful workhorse of a video application to slip in completely under the radar and be as underutilized as possible. What would you do to kill its chances of being discovered? For starters, you would introduce an early version - the debut perhaps – that wasn’t quite ready and was therefore unreliable, in terms of features and stability, in order to scare off the early adapters. You could then, if you were clever, make sure that any succeeding versions were not directly integrated with any popular applications sitting right next to it in the installation. You could make it look like it was designed primarily to create Flash videos. Finally, if you made it so fully featured that it was, in fact, challenging to easily understand – bingo, that tool would be almost forgotten!

Adobe Media Encoder made an inauspicious debut with Adobe Production Premium CS4, only to be radically improved in terms of reliability, for CS5 and then radically improved again, including support for GPU acceleration and 64 bit memory handling, with its CS5.5 update.

Encoding applications are, by and large, not cheap, let alone included as free add-ons. When such a valuable app is made a freebie, as with Apple’s late Compressor, users are encouraged to keep expectations low when it comes to fundamental reliability and versatility.

Adobe Media Encoder is not perfect, but it is certainly rather too useful to be ignored for all of the After Effects artists and Premiere Pro editors out there who can find it sitting right there next to their bread and butter applications. And what exactly can it do? Here are some basic capabilities of AME that you may consider valuable:

• Background processing
• Watch Folder support
• Multi-pass encoding
• Multi-device & multi-format support

Let’s take a look, and see if we can lift the veil a little. read more...