Squeeze6_ui

Those video encoding stalwarts over at Sorenson today announced the availability of Squeeze 6. It looks to be a whole new product from the ground up. There’s a newer interface, faster encoding, better H.264 quality (yep, the actual Sorenson codec should be dead and gone now) with a new timecode filter, Flash and WMV encoding and easy notifications to both the user and clients. They’ve included a free one year account with their new Sorenson 360 service which is an online review and approval website that looks to be a very easy way for your clients to review and approve edits. This really looks like a nice leap forward. Lots of information and video about Squeeze 6 can be found at the Sorenson Media website.

They also specifically note Avid and Final Cut Pro integration. While Avid users have been used to Squeeze for quite a while (the Avid Media Composer software bundle has long included a Squeeze license) it might be new to a lot of FCP users. It’s definitely worth looking at for those FC Studio users who do lot of compression since … let’s face it … Compressor is a big pile of crap for a lot of users. Between the usual Qmaster and batch submission problems that have always plagued Crapressor, the newest version has seen a lot of users complaining about compression quality. I’ll add to that constant crashing when adding more than 10 or 20 files to a batch at a time. If you can’t set up a large batch then what is a compression application good for? This may be an opportune time for Squeeze 6 to come along. It’s biggest hurdle? The $799 price tag. That’s almost the price of Final Cut Studio itself. Of course if you have to get a lot of compression done, done well and in a timely manner then just maybe ….. I wonder how it handles Canon DSLR H.264 QuickTimes?