Software Suppliers - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 652

The ffmpeg toolkit, which is available for all platforms you are likely to need it on.

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Arne Schirmacher's Kino application for Firewire DV input and editing.

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The dvgrab command line tool for Firewire DV input.

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There are many other useful links and resources available at Arne Schirmacher's
Linux DV web site. See the list of URLs at the end of this appendix for details.

C.3 Adobe

You will very likely purchase and install some Adobe software. The company's products
are all good, reliable, and robust. These days some items are not as widely supported as
they used to be, but this shouldn't cause you any problems because, for example, on a Mac
OS system you will probably be using Final Cut (Pro or Express) instead of Premier any-
way. That's probably why Adobe discontinued support for Premier on the Mac. On
Windows, you have a large variety of alternatives to choose from.

Table C-1 Adobe Software Products

Product Description Platforms

After Effects Useful as a power tool for special Mac OS and Windows

effects and key frame-based
restoration jobs

Photoshop Image touch-up and title generation Mac OS and Windows

Encore DVD authoring. Windows only

Illustrator Title generation, diagram and Mac OS and Windows

information-page creation

Premier Video editing Windows only

C.4 Canopus (ProCoder)

This is a compression framework application much like Squeeze or Cleaner. ProCoder is only
available on Windows but is a competent alternative and functionally similar. The application
implements watch folders and supports a variety of popular input and output formats.
The Canopus company has been supplying encoding software for some years.
During 2004, the ProCoder Station software was launched; this adds batch coding and
workflow control. This is not a cheap solution by any means, but it is designed to fit into
a networked architecture and be shared by many users.
The transcoding capabilities are similar to those provided by the Telestream Flip
Factory product. ProCoder Station is aimed at the professional and the medium- to large-
sized organization.