Sorenson Media's Squeeze 4

Video can be brought into Squeeze by any of three methods: You can import a file, create a "watch folder" on your hard drive or capture video through a Firewire connection from a video source such as deck or camera. Once the video is in, you choose what output compression to perform on the clip and any filters you want to apply. You also can recrop the video and set new in and out points. This is useful if your video is coming from a camera and you don't want to first edit the clip in a package like Apple Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere.

I tested Squeeze on an Apple PowerMac G5 running dual 2.5-GHz processors. For a test clip, I used a 108-MB 30-second piece of digital video, and compressed the clip into a few smaller MPEG-4 and QuickTime clips. The output quality was excellent. To my eye, the largest of the MPEG-4 files was, in fact, equal to the original, and in some respects it actually looked sharper. When I played the original and the MPEG-4 side by side for my office mates, they couldn't tell the difference--amazing when you consider Squeeze compressed 108 MB into a 3.8-MB file.

Squeeze's filtering capabilities have been greatly improved, thanks to added filters for audio normalization, deinterlacing, audio and video fade in/out, video noise reduction, white/black restore, contrast/brightness/gamma and telecine removal. The filters are straightforward to configure and add to your video clips, and Sorenson also ships some preconfigured filters that can be easily adapted for your purposes. I wish Sorenson worked with Photoshop plug-in filters, however, so that some of these could be added to my video clips on post-processing through Squeeze.

The New Squeeze