Sorenson Media's Squeeze 4

Video can be brought into Squeeze by any of three methods: You can import a file, create a "watch folder" on your hard drive or capture video through a Firewire connection from a video source such as deck or camera. Once the video is in, you choose what output compression to perform on the clip and any filters you want to apply. You also can recrop the video and set new in and out points. This is useful if your video is coming from a camera and you don't want to first edit the clip in a package like Apple Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere.

I tested Squeeze on an Apple PowerMac G5 running dual 2.5-GHz processors. For a test clip, I used a 108-MB 30-second piece of digital video, and compressed the clip into a few smaller MPEG-4 and QuickTime clips. The output quality was excellent. To my eye, the largest of the MPEG-4 files was, in fact, equal to the original, and in some respects it actually looked sharper. When I played the original and the MPEG-4 side by side for my office mates, they couldn't tell the difference--amazing when you consider Squeeze compressed 108 MB into a 3.8-MB file.

Squeeze's filtering capabilities have been greatly improved, thanks to added filters for audio normalization, deinterlacing, audio and video fade in/out, video noise reduction, white/black restore, contrast/brightness/gamma and telecine removal. The filters are straightforward to configure and add to your video clips, and Sorenson also ships some preconfigured filters that can be easily adapted for your purposes. I wish Sorenson worked with Photoshop plug-in filters, however, so that some of these could be added to my video clips on post-processing through Squeeze.

The New Squeeze

Passing Through

You can create one filter that combines all of the above functionalities, but if you need to mix and match, you must still create multiple filters. The addition of filters slows down the compression process, even with the all-in-one filter, but it won't be significant enough to notice unless you regularly time your compressions.

Sorenson has improved the codecs in Squeeze 4, including the FLT codec for Flash animations. This product could be worth the price for Flash animators, just to take advantage of the quicker downloads.

MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 have also been added with support for creating VCD and SVCD files. For Macintosh users, Sorenson has also enabled .rm encoding of files in version 7, 8 and 9 file formats.

The biggest addition, though, has to be the AVC (Advanced Video Coding) codec. A proprietary moniker, AVC is another name for the H.264 codec or MPEG-4 Part 10. AVC has been ratified by the DVD Forum to be included in the HD-DVD format and will work on SD (standard definition) signals or lower as well as HD (high definition).Squeeze 4 supports more input and output file formats than I have room to list here. Rest assured that it can cover just about any need.

Squeeze 4 requires a minimum Pentium III with Windows 2000 or XP, or a Macintosh G4 with Mac OS 10.2 or higher. Both require a minimum of 128 MB of RAM.

Darrin Woods is a Network Computing contributing editor. He has worked as a WAN engineer for a telecom carrier. Write to him at [email protected].