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Let's save us both a lot of time. If you're looking for the cheapest cloud encoding service for low-volume production quantities, skip to the next article; Elemental Cloud isn't for you. On the other hand, if you're a high-volume producer seeking the ability to acquire secure, dedicated cloud resources capable of fast, high-quality encoding, read on. Ditto if you're an existing Elemental hardware customer seeking to send overflow jobs to the cloud, or if you're just interested in learning the differences between platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS), which is the operating schema used by the bulk of cloud providers.
Still here? Okay, great. As you suspected by now, this is a review of Elemental Cloud. By design, Elemental Cloud uses the same interface and application as Elemental's appliance-based encoders. I reviewed the Elemental Server appliance previously (bit.ly/Ozer_elemental), and everything I wrote about the interface applies equally to Elemental Cloud. If you're encoding with Elemental hardware, you can deploy the same presets and control the consolidated operation of the appliance and cloud from the same interface and/or API, which is an advantage no other cloud offering can match.
In this review, I'll focus on the cloud-specific workflows and operation, as well as performance and quality comparisons with other cloud suppliers. I'll discuss how pricing compares among the various suppliers, but Elemental doesn't publish its pricing so I can't share any hard numbers. Let's start with a brief look at features.
Elemental Cloud Features
The Elemental encoders started life as highvolume H.264 encoding engines, and support for legacy formats such as VP6 was limited. While VP6 and H.263 were never available, Elemental Cloud can output Apple ProRes, HEVC/H.265, MPEG-2 and VC-1, along with AAC, AC3, DTS Express, Dolby Digital Plus, WMA2, and uncompressed WAV and AIFF audio files.
Available output container formats include 3GPP, MP4, F4V, MPEG-TS, MOV, CableLabs Compliant Option (MPEG-TS), Ultraviolet (CFF, UVU), and Microsoft Windows Media (WMV/ ASF). For adaptive streaming, Elemental supports Adobe's HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS), Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), MPEGDASH (MP4, ISO, TS) and Microsoft's Smooth Streaming (ISMV).
Other features are extensive, including support for closed captions, advertising insertion, splicing, multiple audio tracks, multiple encryption, and digital rights management (DRM) technologies, as well...