This is the software publisher’s description.

Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition Beta 1 is an exciting new addition to the Windows Media tools family. It is a powerful tool for video professionals, optimized for the creation of high-quality offline encoding using Microsoft’s implementation of the VC-1 video standard (WMV9).

Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition Beta 1 provides the key features necessary to create next-generation video content and capitalize on the growing importance of scenarios around optical media and video-on-demand.

With the final standardization of VC-1, “Studio Edition”, will prove to be an invaluable tool for the offline encoding community.

Windows Media Encoder supports segment-based re-encoding, which allows the content editor to adjust settings for specific segments of an encoded file, and then re-encode only that segment.

This capability applies to scenarios where the content editor attempts one or more “passes” at a given piece of content (content creators often use one or more passes to analyze the content, then subsequent passes to actually encode).

This makes it possible to optimize the quality of each segment of a given clip, creating the highest possible quality even for clips with dramatically different attributes from one segment to the next.

Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition can seamlessly make the transition from 10-bit to 8-bit without introducing artifacts or contouring.

By utilizing both random dither and error diffusion, Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition enables content creators to capture at full bit depth without resorting to truncating or rounding any of the bits. This makes it possible to encode to 8-bit without sacrificing quality.