The first hobby I had, or at least the first at which I seriously applied myself, was building model airplanes. The plastic kind, I should clarify, as designed by Monogram and Revell. I stuck solely to modern jet fighters, and continued to put them together from grade school up through college.

Although few of my endeavors still exists (chaff may work against enemy SAMs, but not my mother's cat, apparently), it's not hard for me to recall how far my skills progressed. My first attempts were nothing more than smatterings of modeling glue, chunks of plastic and red spray paint (nothing like bright red Rust Oleum to camouflage that F-111), while my final attempts were intricately detailed dioramas put together with airbrushes, X-Acto blades, and some stinky, milky liquid to help the decals lie down better.

With practice, after all, comes skill, and with skill comes the need for tools. This is the point when hobbiests get to fill their basement with the cool stuff necessary to create the best product possible. My garage is empty, however, for two reason. First, I don't have a basement. Second, model airplane building has been replaced by editing videos.

At first, the Sony Hi-8 was enough. But then came iMovie, and suddenly that's all changed. Editing my footage is no longer a crap shoot of well timed music and a quick release of the pause button, it's a calculated a decision; a skill, I like to think. As with my other hobbies, that skill has led me to seek out the best possible tools for the hobbiest, the latest of which is Sorenson Squeeze.

Developed by the video experts at Sorenson Media, Squeeze is a video compression tool that alleviates much of the usual guesswork. It allows you to easily encode QuickTime media (AVI, MOV and DV formats) for various delivery methods without an in-depth knowledge of compression technology.

To me, this is important for two reasons. First, after I edit a video, I normally deliver it multiple methods. I'll burn it onto a DVD for myself, I'll dump it onto a Zip for those who don't have a DVD player, and I'll compress it for the web to put up on iTools. Having a program such as Squeeze tremendously speeds up this process by automating many (if not all) of the settings. Second, by the time I finish a project, I'm usually so sick of it that I don't want to be bothered futzing about with audio codecs and video parameters. I'd sometimes rather hand it over to someone and say, "Here, have at it, just make sure it looks good."

Of course, that's only sometimes. I'm also pretty much a control freak who likes to tinker with every possible outcome. Sorenson Squeeze accommodates that side of me as well. I found this interesting. The first time I used Squeeze, it was without even glancing at the manual. I launched the program, opened a movie, chose my destination, and that was it. Simple enough, yet there's still an 88 page manual included. Why so long? Well, because there's an awful lot of white space in there and because Sorenson allows for customization of the settings, most of which need to be explained multiple times to hobbiests such as myself. The manual takes the complexity of video/audio compression and lays it out step by step. You can either choose to learn it or stick with the basic Sorenson settings. Whichever route you go, Sorenson delivers impressive results.

Want to hear some of these confusing technologies that Squeeze supports? Okay, how about variable bit rate (VBR) compression? Squeeze supports two-pass VBR compression for higher-quality video while only requiring slightly more processing time. If speed is your thing, you can opt to select one-pass VBR compression which reduces processing time to non-VBR standards. Amazingly quick, this became my method of choice as the quality was only slightly lower than that of two-pass VBR...certainly not noticeable to most of my viewing audience.

It should be noted, however, that Squeeze requires Sorenson Video 3.1 Professional Edition for VBR compatibility. It goes like this; Squeeze is smart enough to figure out if you have the standard edition of Sorenson Video 3 that ships with QuickTime 5 or Sorenson Video 3.1 Professional. Only when Squeeze is used together with the Professional version of Sorenson Video 3.1 can it take advantage of both one and two-pass VBR along with other advanced features of the codec to give you the best results possible.

Those aren't your only choices. Included encoders are Sorenson MPEG-4 for video, and QUALCOMM PureVoice, Qdesign Music 2, Fraunhofer MP3 and IMA 4 for audio.

As mentioned, if you don't want to mess around with these options, you can simply select how you want the final product to be delivered and Squeeze will take care of everything for you. You can select to output to internet connections from 56K dial-up to multiple levels of broadband, or you can chose to go directly to CD and such. Although these settings are adequate, I suggest you take advantage of the manual and learn your way through the technology so that more customized results can be achieved.

Squeeze boasts a couple other nice features as well. It can take advantage of multi-processor systems, for example, and allows you set up and compress multiple movies at once. Both features can tremendously expedite the workflow, web designers, multimedia curators, and those who just like to mess around.

Of course, all of this isn't to say that Squeeze is perfect for everyone. Terran's Cleaner offers a stronger feature-set and supports more input and output formats, but it also retails for $300 more than the normal Squeeze price. It's also not yet OS X compatible, is more complicated to use, and doesn't have Sorenson Video 3.1 Professional Edition which, quite frankly, rocks.

There's also the familiarity with Sorenson Media's Vcast service, an automated, easy-to-use Web casting service that delivers compressed video content over the Web. After the video clips are filmed, Vcast will provision, store and manage the video for streaming distribution on the Internet. This technology is most recently being used by the Department of Defense, Compaq (excuse me?), and Digital Island to launch the Give Thanks America campaign, an initiative that allows Americans to quickly record and send streamed video messages of support and thanks to the U.S. troops currently serving in and near Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.

Unfortunately, Squeeze isn't infallible. Although I experienced no troubles with the program in Mac OS 9.2.1, it would often crash on start-up in OS X (a decent opportunity to test out protected memory). The initial interface can also be confusing. After launching Squeeze, all hints of the program disappear behind a standard Mac OS "open file" dialogue. This is not a problem once you expect it, but my initial reaction upon seeing this is that the program has crashed. That's not how I like to feel before entering a project.

A couple additional features could also benefit Squeeze. I would like for the video pane to offer some sort of image quality preview--even if only for a few seconds of material--when I choose my output method. This would slow down the compression selection process, I'm sure, but would save the time of compressing video only to decide the quality is too low or the file size is too high. And speaking of file size, it would also be helpful if Squeeze could estimate a final output file size before compression as well, much as ImageReady does when compressing a graphic for web use. It should be noted that Squeeze does at least estimate the bandwidth on custom settings.

Again, Squeeze is not the tool for everyone. However, it's ease of use, varied compression options, relatively low price (for now, anyway; my rating below could drop one at a $300 price point), and support for Sorenson 3.1 Professional and VBR compression make it a useful program for both the hobbiest and professional alike. Especially if you're putting video on the web, there's no reason you shouldn't have Sorenson Squeeze doing the grunt work for you.

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