AWS Elemental MediaConvert is the per-minute incumbent: upload to the cloud, pay per normalized minute of output, forever. TRNSCODE is the opposite bet — a flat monthly ceiling on hardware your building already owns.
Both columns describe what actually ships — theirs from what they publish, ours from the product. Nothing guessed, nothing padded.
| TRNSCODE | AWS MediaConvert | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Software you run: a master and a worker fleet on your machines | A managed transcoding service inside AWS regions |
| Your media | Stays on your SAN, behind your firewall — no upload step exists | Uploads to S3; outputs come back over the wire |
| Cost model | Flat: $0 (Solo) to $999/mo (Studio Plus, unlimited workers) | Per normalized minute of output — $0.012/min first bracket, Professional tier, US East (4K ≤30fps counts 4×) |
| 150 hours of 4K a month | Studio 25 — $249 flat | ~$432 at the published floor rate, before HEVC/quality multipliers |
| Next month | Same flat fee, same fleet | The meter starts at zero and runs again |
| Storage & egress | None billed — it's your LAN | S3 storage and data egress billed separately |
| Elastic scale | Your hardware is the ceiling — add a box, get throughput | Effectively unlimited burst capacity — their genuine strength |
| Editorial workflows | EXR · OCIO · ACES ingest, NLE round-trip (Avid, Premiere, FCP, Resolve), dailies and review | Built for OTT/broadcast delivery pipelines, not editorial round-trips |
| Job evidence | 11 verifiers score every job; the evidence ships with the deliverable | CloudWatch metrics and job status; QC is your own workflow |
If your load is a spiky, planet-scale OTT pipeline with no hardware and no wish to own any, an elastic meter is the right shape — nobody out-bursts AWS. TRNSCODE's case begins where post-production actually lives: the footage is already in the building, the machines are already paid for, and the meter never stops being a meter.
You have no hardware and want none, your volume spikes unpredictably by orders of magnitude, your sources already live in S3, and per-title cloud cost is an acceptable line item.
Your footage is on a SAN under NDA, your building is full of machines that sleep half the day, your monthly volume is steady enough that a flat fee beats a meter — and you want evidence, not hope, attached to every deliverable.
If AWS MediaConvert ships something that makes a row here outdated, tell us — info@trnscode.com — and the row gets fixed. These pages are only worth keeping if both columns stay true.
At steady post-production volume, usually — 150 hours of 4K a month is roughly $432 at MediaConvert's published floor rate versus $249 flat on Studio 25, and the gap widens with HEVC, quality modes and volume. At near-zero or wildly spiky volume, the meter can win. The math section on our pricing page shows the arithmetic so you can run your own numbers.
It scales to the hardware you give it — every box you add is throughput, and Studio Plus removes the worker cap entirely. What it deliberately does not do is rent you burst capacity: if you need a thousand machines for one weekend, that is AWS's game.
They overlap on 'video goes in, encoded video comes out' and diverge on everything around it. MediaConvert is a delivery-pipeline service; TRNSCODE is a post-production tool — editorial proxies, EXR ingest with colour management, review gates, and verification evidence on every job, running where the footage already lives.
Install the master, join a worker, submit a job. Self-hosted and free to run on hardware you already own.