Review: Sorenson Squeeze 4.5

In two of three scenes shot against a compression un-friendly background, generally an open, light-colored, reflective wall, Squeeze showed more compression artifacts than Flix Pro (Figure 5), though in the other such clip the situation was reversed. If producers encoding with Flix Pro bumped saturation a bit in their editors, and Squeeze producers utilized a compression friendly background, you couldn’t tell the difference between the two quality-wise without a scorecard.

Figure 5 (below): In this clip, Squeeze was more vivid, but showed more compression artifacts in the backgrounds.

One grumble is that Squeeze doesn’t accurately hit encoding targets when encoding to Flash Video, often as much as 10-15% off. This proved irritating to me, because it took several tries to produce a file with the same actual bit rate as the Flix file, but that may not be relevant for many producers. However, be sure to check file size when encoding to Flash, just to make sure you’re in the ballpark.

Bottom line, if you’re producing in multiple streaming formats, or producing the same file to multiple encoding parameters: Squeeze is the clear winner, while Flix wins out if you need to key out a chromakey background while encoding. Otherwise, it’s pretty much of a draw. QuickTime Encoding
One key new feature in Squeeze 4.5 is the ability to encode with Apple’s AVC codec, which Sorenson admits provides superior quality to their homegrown H.264 codec. We compared Squeeze to QuickTime Pro, and found that as with the Windows Media Encoder, Squeeze’s high-quality deinterlacing produced much better results with 640x480 videos, with a look very similar to that shown in Figure 3, though quality was very similar at 320x240. In time trials, Squeeze encoded our one-minute video in 5:40, exactly one minute faster than QuickTime.

Of course, QuickTime Pro has no real batch capability and can’t produce VBR Flash or RealVideo files, making Squeeze a great option for high-volume QuickTime producers or those streaming multiple formats.

Overall, Squeeze is one of the most important general-purpose encoding products available, and worth a look by anyone who encodes streaming video.

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