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Review: Sorenson Squeeze 3 Compression SuiteReviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Computer: 867MHz G4, 640MB RAM, ATI RADEON 8500, Mac OS X Review Date: July 26, 2003
When I last took a look at Sorenson Squeeze, I mentioned that taping and editing video had become a new hobby of mine. Since then, I've upgraded my computer to one that could better handle video, I've replaced my trusty Sony Hi8 with a Canon GL2 digital camcorder, and I won the highly coveted "Best Music Video" award at G-Fest 2002 in Chicago for my interpretation of "Mr. Astronaut Glenn" by the band Terminal Lovers. Shameless promotion aside, editing video has become more than a hobby for me, it's become a passion. I spend more time in camera stores than has been deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization, and I now bypass the games section of the Apple Stores to head straight to the video software. Final Cut Express, I'm almost there, buddy. Although the new camcorder and iMovie upgrades have made filming and editing video much easier on me since 2001, video compression remains a confusing and often daunting prospect. It's no problem dumping my videos to DVD or back out the camcorder, but what if I need to put them on a CD for those without DVD players? Or, how about my friends overseas? What's the best way to make my videos available to them? Enter Sorenson Media's Squeeze 3 Compression Suite. This suite comprises the Sorenson Video 3.1 Pro video codec, Sorenson Spark Pro, and Sorenson MPEG-4 Pro. Combined, these three applications allow you to input AIFF, WAV, AVI, DV and MOV videos, but output to only MOV, FLV, SWF and MP4 formats. In other words, you can make your movies available for Flash, QuickTime and MPEG-4 players, but not Windows Media and RealMedia formats. I know, we're Mac users, so who cares, right? A great majority of web and computer users, actually, so it's a shame this compatibility isn't built into the Mac version of the Suite. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. The greatest asset of the Squeeze 3 Compression Suite is its ease of use. Although it boasts of one- and two-pass VBR compression, stitching for SWF files, in/out trim points and such, you don't need to know what any of this means to take advantage of the program's power. You should know what this means, and you'll certainly want to learn as you grow more comfortable with the program, but Sorenson is all about making sure those of us without a strong knowledge of video compression terms and techniques can still achieve good results.
Let's say you've selected a .mov file already on your computer. The window that opens in Squeeze shows you a preview of your video, above which lies a row of buttons. On the far left side of this row are your four choices for output type: .mov, .swf, .flv, and .mp4. The type you select here will determine how the buttons on the far right of the row will work, but we'll get to those in a moment. First, let's take a look at the filter button. Although Sorenson wants compression to be easy for you, they also want you to retain control your video. The filter button allows for this by giving you the ability to assign fade points, adjust elements such as contrast, brightness and gamma, and even crop the image for custom, standard, and 16:9 and 2.35:1 widescreen formats. Again, easy to understand, and the preview window shows you in real time your changes will affect your movies. Granted, this should all be done in your video editing program, but if you missed something or are getting the file from another source, the filter options prove quite handy.  Choosing your output destination is a simple matter of selecting from the default buttons on the right side of the window. No matter which output type you select, you can, with the click of a button, format your video for 56K, 100K and 300K streaming, progressive (small, medium and large), local LAN and local CD. You can add multiple options, but doing so doesn't alter the preview window. It would be great if you could see in the preview window how each compression method chosen would alter the file. At the very least, I would like for the Output Summary to show the final file size—or, at least an estimation—of the compression settings chosen. Each selection also allows you to prepare the video for Vcast, Sorenson's on-demand video broadcasting service.  Of course, you're not limited to these presets. You can open any setting and edit various video and audio compression elements. Squeeze 3 is smart enough to alter various compression methods depending upon the output type. For instance, when exporting to FLV for Flash MX, the only audio compression options are uncompressed and Fraunhofer MP3. When exporting to a QuickTime movie file, however, you can choose from QDesign Music, Qualcomm PureVoice, Apple IMA 4:1 and Fraunhofer MP3. If the method chosen offers additional options, such as with Qualcomm PureVoice, the Options button becomes active to let you know you can further customize your settings. One element of this window didn't appear to be working, which is too bad as it's one I feel is quite important. When altering the frame size, there's a checkbox you can select to maintain the aspect ratio of the source image. For instance, switching the width of a 320x240 pixel file to 640 pixels wide should automatically adjust the height to 480. Not so. Whether this box is checked appears to have no effect on the actual aspect ratio, so you'll still have to do the math yourself when resizing files.  It's also somewhat odd that you can't just click a button to access the customized settings window. Instead, you must first select a preset button (probably the one that comes closest to the settings you want), then edit the settings. Likewise, although Squeeze does provide you the option of saving your custom settings, you have to use this back-end method to access them. Depending upon your computer, the size of your files, and the compression options selected, the actual compression process can take quite a long time. There's no avoiding this, though, which is what makes Sorenson Squeeze 3 such a handy program. Custom interface troubles and a lack of certain key features aside, Squeeze 3 greatly speeds up your compression selection process so that more time can be set aside for the actual grunt work. The full suite provides all of the options a Macintosh user could want, save for those who want to output their video to the more popular Windows formats. All of the formats that are provided are PC compatible, however, so this may not be such a glaring omission for some users. The Sorenson Squeeze 3 Compression Suite does what it promises; it brings together a strong and varied set of compression tools and provides simple, fairly intuitive access to them. Video novices can get started right out of the box, but it won't be long before they'll want to study up on the various customizable options (the 174 page PDF manual included on the disk does a pretty good job of explaining the various options and terms, but there's plenty more that can (and should) be learned). The impressive thing is that the more you learn about what Squeeze 3 is doing, and the more comfortable you are bypassing the presets, the more you'll realize you really don't need to. Whether you're filming news blurbs for web delivery, video tours for DVD, or Godzilla music videos for multimedia CDs, The Sorenson Squeeze 3 Compression Suite will make sure it fits...and looks good wearing it.
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When you first launch Sorenson Squeeze, you're asked from which source you'd like to retrieve your movie: a single movie file on your hard drive, movie files from within your watch folder (for batch processing), or directly from your digital camcorder. From there...well, let's make this program as easy as it can be...