If you're looking for a video transcoding product to compress your vacation
vids, look to something other than the ultra-competent, but extremely pricey
Sorenson Squeeze 9. If however, you're a busy professional who needs to produce
video in a variety of formats in the shortest possible time, Squeeze is what
you're looking for. It's a fast, comprehensive, extensible, and highly
configurable transcoder. The client program comes in three flavors: a $799
standard version, a $999 pro version, and a $2000 server version.
Sorenson Squeeze 9's interface sports a host of minor
improvements and some color to break things up, but it didn't need a lot of help
in the first place. Here you see the side-by-side preview with a B&W filter
engaged on the left.
New to Squeeze 9 are support for HTML 5, an improved video preview window
with side-by-side preview, a slightly improved interface…and more speed. The
company claims three- to six-fold improvements, depending on the output codecs
involved—and Squeeze supports a lot of those—from Main Concepts h.264 to Ogg
Theora, and just about everything in-between. Also new is pre- and post-roll
video for advertising headers or tags. Closed captioning support now includes
EIA-608 or EIA-708 and Quicktime timecode is now passed through. The Adobe
Premiere plug-in has also been updated.
Using Squeeze is a breeze. Simply open or drag the files you want to convert to the main window, select an output template, do the same with any FX or corrective filters you wish to apply, then click on the Squeeze It! button. Sorenson Media maintains an online library where you can grab more presets. You may of course also choose individual video and audio codecs and tweak individual settings such as bit rates, resolution, etc. on your own.
Squeeze 9 supports nVidia CUDA GPU acceleration, but not AMD APP or Intel's Quick Sync. However, it will now take advantage of all the cores in your CPU. With the four physical and four virtual cores in my Core i7-3770 test bed, that meant very, very good performance. That meant transcoding a two-hour DVD to h.264 and aac in the background in about half an hour. Despite the heavy CPU usage, the rest of Windows 7 was still quite responsive.
Despite the heavy CPU usage, Squeeze plays nice with your
other programs. There was no noticeable slowdown in my Core i7-3770 test bed.
Using Squeeze is a breeze. Simply open or drag the files you want to convert to the main window, select an output template, do the same with any FX or corrective filters you wish to apply, then click on the Squeeze It! button. Sorenson Media maintains an online library where you can grab more presets. You may of course also choose individual video and audio codecs and tweak individual settings such as bit rates, resolution, etc. on your own.
Squeeze 9 supports nVidia CUDA GPU acceleration, but not AMD APP or Intel's Quick Sync. However, it will now take advantage of all the cores in your CPU. With the four physical and four virtual cores in my Core i7-3770 test bed, that meant very, very good performance. That meant transcoding a two-hour DVD to h.264 and aac in the background in about half an hour. Despite the heavy CPU usage, the rest of Windows 7 was still quite responsive.
The transcoding results with Sorenson, thanks to top-flight codecs, are
nothing short of excellent, and the filters—such as black and white,
sepia, auto crop deinterlace, etc.—produce very good results. Squeeze
also supports VST plug-ins for audio.
If you're a pro who does lots of encoding, Squeeze 9 is absolutely worth the price. The encoding is as good and fast as it gets. That said, it's an investment and casual users are better off with a free program such as Freemake Video Converter or Any Video Converter.
If you're a pro who does lots of encoding, Squeeze 9 is absolutely worth the price. The encoding is as good and fast as it gets. That said, it's an investment and casual users are better off with a free program such as Freemake Video Converter or Any Video Converter.
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