The new professional-level Quadro FX 4800 with 1.5 GB of memory brings a much-needed performance upgrade to the Mac Pro lineup. But why do you need a $1,799 graphics card? If you’re not a full-time design/graphics professional with a large budget, you probably don’t. But if you are, the timesaving and quality precision you’ll get with this card pays for itself in no time.

Where this card shines is the NVIDIA’s revolutionary new CUDA technology and Elemental Technologies Elemental Accelerator, which lets your system use all 192 GPU processor cores instead of just the typical eight cores in a Mac Pro CPU. Not only will your system benefit from the increased performance, using the GPU will speed up your workflow by freeing up your CPU to do other tasks. So, what does this mean for the Adobe Creative Suite professional?

Imagine being able to view After Effects’ nested compositions or rendering effects such as Bilateral Blur, Turbulent Noise, and Depth of Field Blur three to five times faster, or even seeing those effects in near real time as you make adjustments? Not to mention rendering the Cartoon Effect 38x faster with the GPU rather than CPU rendering. And it doesn’t stop there! You’re looking at massive speed increases in Photoshop CS4 vs. non-GPU accelerated computers, and the image’s interpolation quality far exceeds that of non-GPU-accelerated systems. In addition, the Elemental Accelerator allows Adobe Premiere to render H.264 movies using the GPU at faster-than-real-time speeds, which is pretty much unheard of with CPU rendering. Plus you’ll be able to render resized movies in half the time.

If you need a professional choice when it comes to workstation-level graphics on the Mac Pro, then look no further than the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800.—Eric Kuna

Company: NVIDIA Corporation
Price: $1,799
Web: www.nvidia.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: GPU acceleration; CUDA technology; Elemental Accelerator
Not: Limited GPU support outside Adobe Apps; cost

I was apprehensive about adding Episode Pro to my growing list of compression applications; however, I’m glad I did. It’s truly an all-in-one solution for encoding on the Mac and PC.

The first thing that stands out about Episode Pro is the depth of the software. You can encode in literally every format and, even if you’re not an expert with compression, it includes numerous presets for different workflows and formats. If you have a deeper understanding of compression, you can customize virtually every setting possible in a compression job, which comes in handy when you need to fine-tune compression to create the desired results.

Episode Pro allows you to set up watched folders that it will monitor, and when you drop a finished project into the designated folder, it automatically starts encoding with your desired settings. In addition, Episode Pro has intelligent monitoring that allows you to monitor subfolders, specify the file types you want to encode or ignore, and filter files to encode automatically. Plus, the software allows you to specify delivery destinations to automatically deliver files after encoding. One of the best features is a plug-in for Apple’s Compressor that allows you to encode in all formats available in Episode Pro from one convenient and familiar interface inside Compressor.

Episode Pro is a sequential encoder, meaning it will encode files in order and needs to finish each file before moving on to the next. Also, it doesn’t allow for distributed rendering between multiple machines on a network, even when using the Apple Compressor plug-in. If these features are important to your workflow, Telestream offers a product that does both called Episode Engine; however, it’s four times the cost of Episode Pro.—Erik Kuna

Company: Telestream, Inc.
Price: $995
Web: www.telestream.net
Rating: 4.5

Hot: Automation; customization; ease of use; Compressor plug-in
Not: No distributed rendering; sequential encoding

In the digital age, when it comes to taking pictures or recording video, we don’t want to worry about capturing and storing our images. PNY has delivered a product to help in this regard: the 32-GB Optima Secure Digital High Capacity Memory Card. This card holds about 2,100 RAW or 4,300 JPEG Fine images from a 12-megapixel camera, or about 13 hours of SD and 4 hours of HD video, allowing you (in most cases) to shoot all day without offloading or switching cards.

I shot about 8,000 RAW images and 6 hours of HD video with my Nikon D90 and Canon HF10 cameras, taking this card through about 40 offloading cycles with no errors or corruption. The best part about this card, however, is its capacity. The convenience of being able to go out to a sports shoot and fire off pictures and video the whole event without switching cards is a beautiful thing.

Though not the subjects of this review, a couple of our in-house editors tested other cards from PNY: the 16-GB Optima Pro Secure Digital High Capacity and the 8-GB Optima Pro UDMA CompactFlash Ultra High Speed cards. The editors report: “The write speed is fast, the cards are solid, and the 16-GB card holds 560 RAW files from the 14.7-megapixel Canon G10. The 8-GB card holds about 1,400 RAW images from a 6.1-megapixel Nikon D70s. The cards were error-free and transparent, meaning we didn’t think about the cards at all because they simply worked.”—Erik Kuna

Company: PNY Technologies
Price: $149.99
Web: www.pny.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: Capacity and price
Not: Could be faster

If you’re looking for compression and encoding software that’s easy to use and at the same time a fully featured professional application, look no further than Sorenson Squeeze 5 Pro. Building on Sorenson’s history of producing high-quality, easy-to-use, video compression software, Squeeze 5 has evolved into a one-stop shop for all your video encoding needs.

Some may ask, “Why not buy a $23 shareware application?” Or, “Why not use the bundled encoder that came with my Suite?” I’ve used different encoders—shareware and bundled applications—and none but Squeeze has the accuracy in detail or clarity in compression, while allowing control over file size and bit rate.

What does this software do so well? First, in version 5, searching and sorting encoding formats and filters has been totally redesigned to allow for a more efficient workflow. Also, Squeeze 5 allows for simultaneous encoding across multiple cores, with up to 1.5 files per core, which dramatically increases encoding times for multiple core machines. And this version permits simultaneous multi-encoding of the same file with different compression settings. This lets you mix Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media, MPEG-2, and much more in the same batch without having to baby-sit the application—a must for anyone having to deliver multiple files in multiple encoding formats efficiently. In addition, the improved H.264 encoder is one of the best I’ve seen so far, producing accurate, high-quality MPEG-4 files every time.

The On2 VP6 Pro Flash video encoder cannot be beat. With 2-pass VBR capability (a feature that Adobe removed from their own Flash video encoder), VP6 Pro increases the quality of your FLV movies without sacrificing precious bandwidth and bit rates. Also, if encoding in Flash is important to you, the ability to encode in the new FV4 format will be a strong benefit if Squeeze 5 is added to your arsenal.

If that’s not enough, Squeeze 5 has brand-new video filters (such as watermarking, sharpening, and saturation) that can be applied to your files in Squeeze before encoding. And speaking of filters, Squeeze includes new audio filters for adjusting volume. The Pro version includes Bias SoundSoap, a filter that will remove hum and noise right inside the audio filters tab without leaving Squeeze.

Some other features worth mentioning are watched folders, Blu-ray support, and the WMV Component for Mac. With watched folders, Squeeze will encode any movie file that appears in the folder using the compression setting you’ve assigned.

Now that Blu-ray has won the VHS/Beta war of the 21st century, support for Blu-ray encoding in Squeeze will be an invaluable asset moving forward. Also, the support for Microsoft’s VC-1 codec is a nice bonus since it has now been adopted as one of the encoding formats for Blu-ray.

Finally, Mac users will benefit from being able to encode with the WMV format using Squeeze’s WMV Component (available at an additional cost) just in case you have a client who wants a WMV file.

So, what’s the verdict? The new version of Sorenson Squeeze Pro offers a complete video compression and encoding package for around $600. Because of the cost, however, it may not be for the beginner. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more easy-to-use, comprehensive program, while still having complete control over quality and output. Squeeze is definitely worth a serious look for anyone having to encode videos in a professional setting.—Erik Kuna

PRICE: $599 ($779 w/WMV Component for Mac)
FROM: Sorenson Media, Inc.
WEB: www.sorensonmedia.com
RATING: 4.5

LAYERS VERDICT
HOT Simultaneous multifile encoding; ease of use; quality
NOT Can be pricey for some users