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Product Review: Page (1) of 2 - 11/03/09

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Sorenson Squeeze 6

Not just THE choice for video compression, it's what everything else will be compared to

By Kevin McAuliffe

These days, it seems as though every company has an application for taking your edited files and processing them for the web, and many of those applications are included with the editing bundle you purchased. Adobe has Adobe's Media Encoder, Final Cut Studio has Compressor, and there are the standalone applications such as Episode, and even QuickTime can do it as well. The problem is that many editors, especially editors who are new to the industry, think that because it comes with the bundle (or OS for that matter) you should use it. That is definitely not the case.

One company that has been in the video compression business for a long time is Sorenson Media, makers of the very popular Sorenson Squeeze application. Squeeze debuted for the Mac way back in July of 2001, and since that version, it has been making steady steps forward to position itself at the top of the video compression business. Let's see if the newest version of Sorenson Squeeze (version 6), will make it the standard for video compression on Mac and Windows.

Installation
Sorenson Squeeze 6 (SS6) is available for both Mac and Windows, and is a quick install, and you should be up and running in about five minutes. Sorenson also offers a free 30 day trial of the application, so you can try before you buy. There is one thing that I want to point out, and that is that you will notice during the installation process you will be greeted by a screen that looks like this:

This screen is one of the main reasons you will want to either upgrade or purchase SS6, but we'll get back to it later in the review.

What's new in Squeeze 6
Along with its sleek new interface, Sorenson has put some real power under the hood. Here are some of the awesome new features.

Notifications

You can have SS6 send you and/or your client an e-mail or SMS text message when an encoding job is finished.

Publishing Presets

With a few clicks, SS6 will upload your videos to a variety of different hosting platforms such as You Tube, Twitter, Akamai, Limelight, Sorenson 360, and many others.

New Filters
Sometimes you need to add certain looks to your footage after you have captured it directly into Squeeze (yes, you can capture DV video footage directly into Squeeze!), or exported it from your NLE. SS6 adds new filters to help you finesse your videos final look including Tint, White Balance and my personal favorite, (and one that everyone will use on a regular basis) Timecode.

More Output Formats
Much like I always say, you can never have enough plug-ins. Well, you can never have enough output options either, and SS6 adds even more formats to the already extensive lineup including DV Stream, AVI, Image Sequence, Wave and AIFF just to name a few.

Squeeze 6 Preset Exchange
There's nothing worse than purchasing a program to compress videos, and not being able to find a preset that will work for a job you happen to be doing. Well, don't worry about that with SS6. Sorenson has created the Sqeeze 6 Preset Exchange. Now you can browse an online repository of different encoding presets, and download them directly into SS6 for immediate use.