Sorenson Squeeze 3 Compression Suite

If you do a lot of new media work, you probably need to create web videos for clients. This has been a daunting task to say the least and requires you to get hold of several tools. For outputting QuickTime movies, you'll need QuickTime Pro or MediaCleaner. For outputting Real Video, you'll need Real media producer. For outputting Windows Media video files, you'll need The Windows Media Encoder and so on.

None of the tools output the other formats so creating good streaming video usually requires you to learn all those tools.

Sorenson promises to end all these problems with their new tool Sorenson Squeeze 3 Compression Suite. Sorenson made waves when Flash MX (FMX) was launched and they had produced the video codec used in Flash. The video compression that comes built into FMX is OK for playing with, but if you want to do serious streaming video, you'll want Double pass Variable BitRate (VBR) compression. Sorenson Squeeze 1.0 was available the same day as FMX and offered the advanced features required by professionals.

Squeeze 3 Compression Suite is the new kid on the block and supports AIF/AIFF, ASF, AVI, DV, MOV, WAV, WMA, and WMV files as input files. Output formats include SWF, FLV, MOV, MP4, WMV, WMA, or RM files. Video capture have also been added, so Squeeze 3 Compression Suite is now an all-in-one solution.

Features
Among the tools you will find automatic de-interlacing, color correction, fade in/out, white/black balance, normalizing Audio and image cropping.

KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) seems to be the rule of thumb when Sorenson designed this program. The interface is very intuitive and quick to use. It actually looks very much like the previous version with new buttons added for RM, MP4 and WMV files. The interface has gotten several small updates that improve on the previous versions. You can now open the filter settings at any time, set default output folders and the output formats are better organized. The toolbar can be personalized and it is easy to add custom presets.

The presets can be adjusted by right-clicking any of the output files. Each format has a lot of sub-options if the standard output settings do not fit perfectly. The advanced user can select variable or fixed bitrate, compression codecs, audio codecs, data and frame rates and more.

What is new for Flash?
A new Flash settings panel has been added. Here you can control playback and decide what will happen when the video ends or the user clicks it. The options available for these events are Get URL or LoadMovie. Rather sparsely, but these can be good for many things. The ability to call any custom function here would be a great feature to add here. Sorenson are looking into expanding these options.

Stitching is the most important new feature for Flash users. If you have encoded long files, you have probably noticed some loss of audio sync during playback or run into the 16.000 frame limit in Flash. Sorenson have addressed this by splitting long videos into several small SWFs that are loaded into Flash and played back after each other. The user will never notice any difference as the upcoming clips are constantly buffered to the users machine. This feature can also be a big saver for those using Flash for CD-ROMs. When playing back CD-ROM video, Flash will load the whole clip into RAM before playing it. If the machine playing back the video lacks RAM, the whole program may crash and stitching can remedy this.

Sorenson have also added templates, complete with playback control buttons so that the not so Flash-savvy can publish their own video straight to the web.

The template-panel also has a panel for entering variables. This is a nice feature that will let you add your own variables for things as title, copyright and other things you may want to go with the video file.

The templates vary from simplistic to good and there is an option for adding your own templates. According to Randon Morford, product manager, Sorenson will make the FLA's for the files used in this panel available so that you can use these as a starting point for creating your own templates. The documentation lacks on this point, but will be added to in a future update.

Upon asking Sorenson questions during this review, they seem vary of the user input and told us that they would add a 'Save settings' option to the program very soon. That could really save a lot of typing...

Performance
The program performed flawlessly during out testing, but we found that the program gobbled all available CPU while compressing. Though not a constant problem, Sqeeze will more or less freeze the machine at times so you'll be annoyed if you try to work while compressing in the background. Video compression is a very CPU intensive task and if you do a lot of this, you'll want to investigate the new Watch Folders feature. The feature will let you setup a folder on any drive, i.e. on one of your servers that Squeeze will watch after. As soon as a file is dropped into that folder, Squeeze will start compressing it to your predefined format and destination folder.

Comparison of the outputs
With all these outputs available, it's very tempting to test what output format delivers the best performance for the same file size. Our sample file was an uncompressed 590Mb movie captured from a DV Cam. The video shows Julian from IdeaWorks 3D, presenting Optimaze at a FlashForward conference.

We took our sample file and outputted it to a 300Kb/sec file (320x240 pixels at 15fps) using the standard settings for all the formats. To our huge disappointment, the Flash version was by far the least attractive of the outputs when played back. Its file size was slightly lower than the others but that shouldn't have that much to say. The image below shows (almost) the same frame from each of the outputs, as well as the original uncompressed image.

Sample files: RM (761Kb), WMV (783Kb), SWF (746Kb), MP4 (787Kb) and MOV (807Kb).

In these stills, the SWF output looks better than when it is played back. Download the files if you wish to compare the results yourself. (The original uncompressed video is not posted due to its massive size). The first you'll notice is that the colors differ quite a lot from format to format. Considering that all the videos have been reduced to about 1.4% of the original size, some artifacts should obviously be expected. Here's a comparison of the color of the same pixel (a 5x5 point sample).

The color differences due to the different methods of compression applied to reduce the file size. For some of these, the video looks flat and not very saturated. The MP4 or the SWF has the least appealing colors, while the RM looks surprisingly good. Not only do the colors look vibrant, but the image also displays fewer artifacts than the others due to a clever smoothing scheme. Now that Real have made it possible to find the free player on their site, the other contestants in the video field should really watch out for them.

Conclusion
This tool can truly save you time and money. For those doing a lot of video compression, we'd say it's a must. With the addition of custom templates, the ability to call custom functions and better documentation Squeeze 3 Compression Suite will become THE choice for video professionals in both the Flash scene and the web business in general.
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