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Sorenson Squeeze 5.1 Review

Sorenson 360 mini-review

As part of this review, I’ll give you a mini-review of Sorenson 360. The interesting thing with Sorenson 360 is that you don’t need Squeeze to use it. Sorenson 360 is a web-based video server service. Part of its functionality is that you can actually upload uncompressed files to it and it will compress them for you. I think most of us would rather do this locally. So, Squeeze 5.1 is linked to Sorenson 360 so you can compress your files locally and have them automatically loaded up to your Sorenson 360 account. Your Sorenson 360 account can function as a place to view your uploaded videos, but the most common ways to use it would be to embed the code from the Sorenson 360 video directly into a website or blog, or to send a permalink file directly to a client. Sorenson 360 clearly displays the embed code and permalink addresses for every video in your 360 account. This is a solution I’m going to be looking in to, to deliver easy access and smooth playback to my clients for approval files. Another of the items on my wishlist for Sorenson 360 would be to allow for a customized, client-branded experience for the permalink. Currently, using the permalink will take your client to a player that is Sorenson-branded. It would be nice to be able to deliver an experience that brands the player with my own company image or even with my client’s company image. When determining which subscription option is right for you, you should realize that each time a video is played counts as a “stream.” So even if you only send one link out to a client, but they view the video 10 times, that’s 10 streams.

Summary

So those are some of the cool features that made me glad that I’d purchased the upgrade as well as some of the things that I hope Sorenson addresses in a future release.

As I mentioned at the top of the review, I purchased the PRO upgrade instead of the regular version. Here’s what my additional $100 got me: command line control (too much for me to deal with), Sound Soap (Nice for some, not really useful to me), and VP6 Flash output (better quality for Flash 8), which I thought was worth the price of admission, even though I have Adobe Media Encoder. You also get a training DVD from Class on Demand, which was pretty good. (full disclosure: I’m a Class on Demand instructor.) I’d rarely messed with any of the filters before watching this training and was convinced that I should be spending a little more time compressing my files correctly. Most of my compression is simply for temporary review and approval purposes, but for the more permanent uses, I hadn’t been doing enough to get the best quality at the lowest data rates.

More of what’s new:

• Sorenson has a new video delivery/server service called Sorenson 360 and, of course, Squeeze 5 integrates with it perfectly. (More on this later as well.)
• They’ve improved the de-interlacing filter to reduce interlacing artifacts and improve the overall quality of compressions based on interlaced material.
• The MainConcept H.264 codec got an update that provides better quality and faster encoding. Sorenson claims that it resolves a key frame issue in the MainConcept H.264 codec, but I’d never encountered that.

If you haven’t upgraded since pre-NAB 2008, the new items also include:

• Simultaneous multi-file encoding. Sorenson Squeeze 5 can compress multiple files at the same time on multi-core machines by allowing users to compress and encode as many as 1.5 files on each of the host computer’s processor cores. So a quad core machine can compress 6 files at the same time.
• New codecs include: VC-1, ATSC A-52, constrained H.264 codecs for Flash. Plus – for PRO users – VP6, which is a high-quality Flash codec for Flash 8.
• Improved quality on MPEG1, MPEG2 and MPEG4 files.
• New and improved preprocessing filters. One of the coolest of these new “filters” includes the ability to place a custom watermark on your videos. The new filtering allows you to customize the order of the filters as they’re applied. This reduces the pre-processing time Squeeze takes when adding filters. There are also new filters to do: hue and saturation, sharpen, audio duration and audio volume. Improved filters include: inverse telecine, blended field deinterlacing, separate audio and video fades, and customizable noise level settings.
• The new Audience Presets feature allows users to bundle preprocessing filters, filter order, encoding settings and even output destinations, such as FTP, into a single custom preset.
• Plug-ins architecture. Sorenson Squeeze 5 includes several audio processing improvements: AC-3- compatible 5.1 to 7.1 surround sound audio and support for many VST audio plug-ins. Also included are filters for Audio Volume and Audio Duration with pitch maintenance.

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