With the last upgrade, Sorenson Media made Squeeze a whole lot faster. Buyers also gain access to a 5GB chunk of the Sorenson 360 service for an indefinite period of time.
Not a year has passed since Sorenson Media released Squeeze 8. Squeeze 8 was no slouch and it was the first transcoding product to output to Avid’s DNxHD format as a ready-to-use folder complete with the property lists and metadata Avid’s Media Composer needs to work with DNxHD files.
But Squeeze 8 was slower than arch-rival Episode 6.2.x and then there was the Sorenson 360 online approval and publishing service, which cost money — and as we know, if it must be paid, nobody seems interested these days.
Now we have Squeeze 8.5 and it’s faster than previous versions. It accomplishes this feat by splitting up the encoding process into chunks — as many as you have processors or cores — and then re-assembling the whole lot at the end of the process. This works very well, but there are caveats.
Some software that runs in the background — Typinator, Little Snitch, Hazel — seems to interfere with Squeeze 8.5’s speed boosting algorithms. The interference results in transcoding times that actually take longer than with version 8. I turned off these three apps and immediately saw what all the fuss was about: Squeeze 8.5 can be as fast as Telestream’s Episode, although not faster unless you buy server engines.
A couple of examples of transcoding with Squeeze 8.5 on an iMac i5/3.1GHz with 16MB RAM and an eSATA LaCie 4Big connected via the LaCie Thunderbolt adapter:
- An 11 sec. AVCHD clip transcoded to DNxHD 220 in 19 seconds.
- An 11:58 min MP4 clip from a GoPro set at 1080/25p transcoded to ProRes 422HQ in 14:35 minutes.
- An 07:33 min ProRes 422HQ clip from a Ninja set at 720/50p transcoded to BluRay 24fps H.264/AC3 in 16:20 minutes.
All test clips were from a driving car with lots of motion.
Squeeze 8.5. also sees a free 5GB Sorenson 360 account thrown in for good measure. The 360 account is targeted at showing customers your footage before you actually finish production. It’s a great service, the site works really well for this purpose, and the free part makes it all the more exciting. If 5GB isn’t enough — for most larger producers it won’t be — you can upgrade to 15GB and more for a relatively low price per month.
In my opinion, the quality that you can get out of Squeeze always has been top-of-the-bill. Squeeze 8.5 adds speed, free cloud space and a number of presets that allow you to resume work on a clip more quickly (like the DNxHD settings). Those features put Squeeze 8.5 at the very top of the transcoding software market.
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