Sorenson Squeeze 7 review

Any video-editing software worth its salt includes sophisticated export options, but there are various reasons to consider a dedicated application such as Sorenson Squeeze. This simple-looking utility packs some serious power, with encoding being just one stage of an automated video-publishing workflow.

Filters can be applied before encoding, including comprehensive de-interlacing options, watermarking, noise reduction, crop and rotate. New to this version is Orient Image, which is useful for digital signage. It can process files that arrive in a watch folder, encode them for multiple destinations, upload to FTP folders and various online services, and send notifications via email and text message. It’s also possible to password-protect uploads and mark them for review and approval.

This review process is delivered through the Sorenson 360 online hosting service, introduced with Sorenson Squeeze 6. A year’s subscription to the service is included once again, and that applies to upgrades too. From then on, Sorenson 360 costs $99 per month. It delivers content to a range of platforms and is useful not only for sharing video with clients and colleagues, but also for publishing on the web.

Squeeze’s import and export format support is extremely comprehensive, with a vast library of export presets. New export formats include MPEG2 transport stream, WebM, VP8, MKV and Ogg Vorbis. The YouTube presets are two years out of date, but further presets are available for download and it’s easy enough to customise them or create new ones. Squeeze’s encoding presets now appear in Adobe Premiere CS4 and CS5, as well as in Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro, which were already supported.

The headline new feature for version 7 is CUDA acceleration. This requires CUDA architecture 1.1, which means virtually all recent Nvidia graphics cards are compatible. It only accelerates MainConcept H.264 encoding, but H.264’s dominance on the web and portable devices means this is still a significant feature.

Sadly, though, the most time-consuming of all encoding jobs – H.264 for Blu-ray – isn’t accelerated. Various other encoding options are missing from the CUDA-based MainConcept H.264 encoder too but are included in the CPU-based one, such as constant bit-rate encoding and control over B-frames and slices (see www.pcpro.co.uk/links/199cuda for the full list).