This test involved compressing a finished DV project to a DVD, and a smaller MPEG-4 video for posting online and playback on a video iPod.

The footage that we chose for this project was a 1-minute and 15-second clip of underwater SCUBA shots with fish, divers and constant camera motion. Because everything in the video is some shade of blue, with subtle color differentiation, this type of video tends to be challenging to compress. We were watching closely for banding and compression artifacts.

We first encoded the clip to a regular MPEG-2 DVD, for playback in the home. We modified one of the DVD settings to use the 2-pass VBR option.

The 1-minute and 15-second clip took only 3 minutes to encode, which we felt was quite speedy for 2-pass VBR encoding. During the compression, both the processor's cores sprang to life with the CPU monitor showing 160-170% of the CPU being used out of a maximum of 200% (100% for each core), indicating that the threading was very efficient. Picture quality of the resulting footage was exceptional, with no banding or compression artifacts in this tough scene.

The next encode used the same footage with the iPod Low preset in the MPEG-4 folder. This time it took about 5 minutes to encode the clip. However, Squeeze used only one of the cores in our dual core processor for this encoding. Currently, some codecs in Squeeze 4.5 are optimized for multithreading and some are not. The resulting video was pristine though, with no noticeable artifacting or banding.

For the second test, we used a 1-minute and 35-second clip of some HDV 1080i60 footage shot during Thanksgiving, and compressed it to the same formats as we did our DV clip.

The MPEG-2 DVD test encoded the clip in 8 minutes 30 seconds, and it used 120-130% of the CPU. Taking into account the extra processing involved in scaling the picture from HD to SD, this is a still a very respectable time. The video quality was also exceptional.

It took 11 minutes to encode our footage to MPEG-4, again only using one of the two CPU cores. The output video was again outstanding.

If the elements of good compression software are video quality and speed, Sorenson 4.5 Compression Suite gets high marks for both of these. While there could be some improvements in the handling of multiple CPU systems (especially for MPEG-4 encoding), the proof is in the picture, and Squeeze 4.5 consistently delivers great video.

OS: Windows 2000 or XP; Mac OS 10.3 or later
Processor Windows: Intel P3 or greater, Mac: Power PC G4 or Intel processor
Memory: 128 MB RAM
Disk Space: 40 MB (Windows), 90 MB (Mac)
Display: DirectX 9.0b or later (Windows)
Support: Microsoft Windows Media Format Runtime, QuickTime 7 or later (Windows), QuickTime 7 or later (Mac)
Input Formats: AAC, AIF/AIFF, ASF, AVI, DV, MOV, MP3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WAV, WMA, WMV
Output Formats: aacPlus, AAC, AIFF, DV, DVD, Sony PSP, 3GPP, FLV (Sorenson Spark and On2 VP6), HD for MP1/MP2/MP4 and RealMedia, MOV, MP3, MPA, MPG (MP1 and MP2), MP4 AVC (H.264), MPV, RM, SVCD, SWF, VCD, WAV, WMV

• Great looking encodes
• Watch folder
• Fast encoding

• Mixed bag of multithreaded codecs

Anyone who's serious about encoding for a wide variety of formats and doing it efficiently will find this their main squeeze.

John Burkhart is Videomaker's Editor-in-Chief