FutureTel Inc of Sunnyvale, California, has introduced Crescendo, a family of upgradeable DVD encoding systems for the DVD content-authoring industry at the NAB show this week. The entry level model is $21,300 and consists of a half-resolution MPEG-2 video encoder, a software AC-3 Stereo encoder, an MPEG-2 decoder, FutureTel’s MPEGWorks Pro encoding studio, a VideoMedia V-LAN Express unit and Daikin’s Basic Scenarist. The next product is $46,000 and adds full-resolution single-pass MPEG-2 VBR/ AFF video encoding capabilities, AC-3 Stereo audio encoding hardware and Daikin’s Advanced Scenarist. The high end model, priced from $62,000, includes Daikin’s Professional Scenarist and the Videomedia VLX-I multiple VTR control unit and PRO-I jog-shuttle keyboard.
