Sorenson Squeeze packs a powerful punch. With lots of advanced features, it’s easily well worth the investment. The compression application has presets that should get novices compressing their media projects quickly. And, because you can still capture video right inside the Sorenson Squeeze 4.5 application (a feature that delivers and works extremely well), many more video editors, multimedia specialists and other pros will save time during their daily encoding workflows. For those who want to encode HD DVD and Blu-ray projects, there are now presets for this inside the new version. Squeeze 4.5 is also faster- three times faster than Squeeze 4.3, in fact, in encoding and pre-processing- and now supports Intel-based Macs.

Also new inside Sorenson Squeeze 4.5 Compression Suite is support for 3GPP and Playstation Portable devices. You can also get great quality videos from just a little tweaking of the included video iPod presets. The 4.5 release includes an Apple AVC codec that’s great for encoding video to the H.264/AVC format for the video iPod. The codec does multi-pass encoding and delivers exceptional iPod video at 320 x 240 and 30fps.

One of the most exciting pieces of the Squeeze application is the "optional tasks" offering, which lets users FTP content directly to their streaming server or Web server after encoding. Hooray! This saves tremendous time during the typically long workflows for streaming video. There’s even an optional tasks FTP for Vitalstream customers and Output to iTunes.

In order to burn DVDs, you’ll have to adjust the default settings. The original default settings for burning DVDs might confuse users, as it did me. Instead, you’ll need to deselect the "Burn to Hard Drive" checkbox inside the "Copy Output to DVD Burner" Optional Task to burn a DVD inside of Squeeze. Also, be sure to uncheck the "Burn DVD Without Menus" checkbox. I’m betting that both of these checkboxes will be deselected by default in future versions of the application.