Video Compression Software Review:
Sorenson Squeeze Compression Suite 4.5

Today's ideal workflow is to create once, and publish anywhere. Compression software is the crucial tool allowing you to deliver your content to an ever-increasing choice of distribution channels. The most important attributes of compression software are video quality and speed. Essentially you want it pretty and you want it fast. How well does Sorenson's new version of Squeeze deliver?

Sorenson's Squeeze Compression Suite has always been one of the pioneers of compression technology, and its 4.5 update packs some new features into what was already a mature product. New to this version of the software are speed enhancements (Sorenson claims a 3x-speed boost for encoding and pre-processing), improved H.264 support, 3GPP and PSP output, Metadata support, DVD burning and a new Universal Binary to run natively on Intel-based Macs.

Setup and installation of Squeeze was simple and straightforward: simply click on the install program and enter the serial number. There are no annoying dongles or activation requirements. The product runs on both Windows and Macintosh computers.

Using Squeeze 4.5 is very straightforward and the user interface is well-designed. You start off in the Import pane, where you can import a file directly, create a watch folder or capture directly from a DV device.

Watch folders in Squeeze 4.5 are a handy way of batch compressing source files into many different delivery formats without having to manually assign the settings for each process. You start by creating a special folder on your system that Squeeze 4.5 continually monitors. You then assign as many compression encoding presets as you want to that folder. Any file that you move there will then be compressed, using the attributes you selected. For example, you have several HDV footage clips that all need to be output as a NTSC video for broadcast, a DVD for home use, and an iPod compatible video for online distribution. You simply assign those compression attributes to the watch folder; drag all the clips you wish to convert into that folder and voilà! The computer processes all the clips sequentially, without the need for any further user intervention.

Once you've imported your footage, you then have a myriad of options of how you want that footage re-encoded. Squeeze 4.5 supports a great many compression settings (see list in Tech Specs). Once you've decided which setting to use, simply drag and drop it onto your footage in the main window.

There are many presets included in the software; all are modifiable, and these settings are a good start if you're looking to simply encode to a specific output format. However if you are a compression expert, you can also roll your own settings from scratch, with an extremely detailed set of options.

We fired up Squeeze on a MacBook Pro (2GHz, Intel Core 2 Duo, 1GB 667MHz DDR RAM, running Mac OS X 10.4.8) and put it through some real world tests. We were curious to examine how well Squeeze 4.5 was optimized to work with multiple processors. Using the new encoding thread priority setting, we cranked the slider all the way to max, to make sure that Squeeze was using all the power available to it.

• Digg This!
• del.icio.us
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit