A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine came to me with a problem. The British distribution company handling his music video was shockingly backwards in its formatting, and was asking for a Real Media encode of the video. They didn’t specify bitrate, resolution, where it would be shown, or anything like that. Quicktime was being a bother, and we needed to use my PC to do a few encodes at this or that specification. We ended up running it through in Vegas, and going to grab a coffee while it churned out the frames.
Now, the point is not that you need a PC to encode heinous old formats, but rather that digital distribution is a weird, complex process that could use a bit of simplification. Sorenson’s Squeeze 6 appears to go to some lengths to make this happen. It’s far from the only encoding platform out there, but I think they’re moving the right direction with this version, which not only integrates tightly with your Mac, but also with SMS, Twitter, and other popular services. After all, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to be working in the same office, or even the same country, as people who need to be informed every step of the way.
Imagine this: You set Squeeze up to watch a folder where master edited files are placed after they’ve been rendered out by FCP. Squeeze grabs the 1.5GB file, re-encodes it for YouTube, DVD, iPhone, and HQ H.264. When it’s done, it places them in a DropBox folder, emails the parties involved, and sends a text to your phone, telling you it’s finished. I may be against connectivity where I feel it’s not useful to me, but damn, if I was a video professional I’d be all over this thing.
The inputs and outputs look pretty comprehensive (though, it is true, Real is not on the list so it would have been useless the other day) — Sorenson is no newcomer to the encoding game, of course — but it’s the fundamentally collaborative nature of the program that makes it interesting to me. I’m not a media pro so I don’t know what tools are already in place for this kind of thing, but I know that the post-production and distribution phase can be a trying time, and this looks like it could streamline and improve the process greatly. Besides, I can see the crop, aspect ratio, and other frequently-adjusted controls right there in the interface, which says to me “user-friendly.”
If you’re in a collaborative video environment (like, I don’t know, College Humor or something), this might be a revelation. Then again, you’re probably also working in an office next to the person who’d be getting your “encode complete” text. At any rate, I think that service integration like this is a great step for a media company to make. It’s for Mac and Windows, but it looks like Macs have the superior version. Since it’s a pro app, however, it comes with the pro price: $500. My budget restricts me to freeware, but maybe yours doesn’t. There’s more info at Sorenson’s site.
Cool. Also check out this cloud-based solution (i have no affiliation with this co)
http://www.hdcloud.com/
Sorenson may have some nice features, but they are (or at least as of version 5) pathetically behind in many aspects, such as actually taking advantage of multiple processors/cores (they claim they do, but I have never seen it work right, after many months of experimentation). The quality of the video they encode is terrible (huge black crush and white blowouts everywhere). Most amazingly of all, they don’t support files with names longer then 31 characters (this should have been fixed ELEVEN YEARS ago). They need to fix a few basic falling before they continue to add new bells and whistles.
1. Not trying to be an ass, but does anybody edit these articles before they get posted? Because that first paragraph is, especially for a professional publication, shockingly badly written.
2. I am also not sure where the news is in this, apart from maybe the notification abilities. Sorensen have been at this game forever, I personally have used the program for at least ten years. Squeeze is one of the standard industry tools and can be found in pretty much any video production setup there is.
3. If cash is an issue, then the lastest version Handbrake does a decent job of transcoding the majority of video formats out there. On the Mac, ffmpegX is another free solution that gets many jobs done.
shockingly, huh? how so?
Note that the PC version of Squeeze outputs to Real Media (if anyone is encoding to that format anymore).
As a video pro I use Mpeg StreamClip on a daily basis. It’s free, it converts from just about any form to any format with more than enough options to get the job done. It’s available for Windows and Mac.
http://www.squared5.com/
Haven’t used Sorenson since 2004. It definitely used to be tops, but I’m not so sure any longer. Everyone I know moved on to better performing, more streamlined products. Sorenson always had great UI though, but was too expensive and lagged on relevant features.
I’ve been using Compressor and On2 Flix
http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/compressor/
http://www.on2.com/index.php?365
Integration with Twitter & other sites? Largely haven’t found one-off things like this very useful in the past. If you doing video, services like TubeMogul are worth looking into:
http://tubemogul.com/
Devin, in this article you appear to be writing outside your realm of expertise with no indication that you’re aware of what’s going on today… unless of course this is a straight ad for Sorenson.
Concerning cloud-based solutions.. at this time I can’t see sending multi GB sized files up to the cloud for rendering as an option. Maybe someday when we (in the U.S.) have average internet speeds as fast as Japan that might be an option.
Until then it would feel like this: http://www.lazylaces.com/56Kmodem/
I find it odd that he’s plugging Sorenson when Vegas saved the day. Vegas is pretty much all you would need.
This is the second article on a sponsor in the last two days without a disclosure.
Hello FTC??
Odd
If you’re a doing any (semi) serious Film/Design work chances are you’re an using Adobe CS4 Suite…
If so you’ve got all the encoding options you need with the built-in Adobe Media Encoder.
Fast Encoding
Tonnes of presets
Create Watch folders
Render from After Effects / Premiere projects
I’ve had great results with it.
From online to Blu-ray everything looks great.
NOT an AD… seriously, I just really like it.