Top 5 Reasons You Need Elemental Live in Your Workflow

Submitted by Sam on April 5, 2010 - 11:39

Today, we announced the next step in the evolution of Elemental's enterprise-class product line: Elemental Live. Over the past two years, we've brought an array of products to market, ranging from a high-speed encoder for professional video editors to our new video processing system for live event streaming. With each product, we have focused our development on dramatically improving the end-user workflow by speeding up video processing and conversion using GPUs and maximizing video quality through proprietary codecs, designed in-house. We've upped the ante again, challenging the video processing paradigm with Elemental Live's features that streamline the live event production and delivery workflow.

Elemental Live Workflow

Elemental Live receives an input stream directly from an SDI source, such as a camera, or a UDP (IP) stream and provides format conversion, image processing and container conversion, outputting a new stream compatible with the desired streaming media server. Multiple streams are then delivered to each end user device.

1. Complete Adaptive Bit Rate Support – Consumers like my family may not know it, but everybody's on the adaptive bit rate streaming bandwagon. Of course, Elemental Live supports adaptive bit rate broadcasts for multiple platforms and their protocols, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and the Apple iPhone. Here's the difference with Elemental Live: it can output all required streams for an event from a single system. In addition, Elemental Live has the processing power to create an archived copy of the event while simultaneously encoding live streams for real-time distribution via adaptive bit rate protocols. Imagine how broadcasters and new media companies can reduce cost and complexity by eliminating the need for multiple units or expensive signal splitting equipment to support adaptive bit rate requirements.

2. Designed From The Ground Up – Codecs may not seem like a workflow inhibitor, but they can really slow down a video processing and streaming workflow. Since Elemental architected our own codecs (H.264, MPEG-2 and VC-1)  for the GPU, it's like having a mechanic for a brother. What takes other companies weeks, we can swiftly diagnose and fix in days to get operators back to streaming in no time. Using proprietary algorithms designed specifically for the GPU, Elemental Live delivers the fastest, most efficient anti-alias scaling, motion adaptive deinterlacing and deblocking. Elemental’s intelligent algorithms reduce cost, improve performance, and deliver quality video output without impacting price or usability.

3. It's Easy to Manage, Operate and Monitor – Initial beta customers have been able to get an Elemental Live system up and running in minutes (literally, we've seen it) within their existing infrastructure. The easy management extends to the production environment with stream control in real time and the ability to automate actions and events for more reliable content. Smart Archive is a unique feature inspired by our hands-on experience early in the dev. cycle streaming keynote presentations at the GPU Technology Conference in October, 2009. Smart Archive enables instant posting of high-quality VOD replays with a simple GUI for start/stop control of streams sent to archive. Also, save cycles through one-click automated publishing to all popular CDNS and lower the cost of content delivery.

4. The Audio's Better Too – This is not always the case with online video, nonetheless, live streaming content. Our real-time control extends to audio processing effects, including support for multiple audio tracks, which provide the best possible sound. Intelligent audio muxing allows audio channels to be combined with a single video stream. This creates unique streams customized for the end user at no additional processing cost. A win-win for all.

5. Cost-effective On All Fronts – One Elemental Live system can replace four CPU-only appliances. This is significant when you're thinking about scaling for a data center or outputting twice as many streams for a live event compared to a prior one. With Elemental Live, there are fewer systems to do the work, less capital expense up front, less operating expense needed for power, cooling and rack space, and a considerable savings in overall management time. If the other four reasons aren't enough, this reason alone is why you need Elemental Live in your workflow.

Check it out yourself. Watch the Elemental Live Streaming Demo.