Sorenson Squeeze 7 races forward

For those of us that go way back, we remember Sorenson as being the CODEC to use. It was what the Starwars Trailer for "The Phantom Menace" was encoded with in 1999. I remember going to Apple and talking with Doug, the guy that did the encode using Media Cleaner Pro. We aptly nicknamed him "Captain Crunch". Back in those days encoding took so long that we had to do something. We actually invested in a Blue ICE card - with 8 processors! This card cost thousands of dollars and it was indeed fast. Well, enter 2011 and Sorenson is still in the Video Compression game. The ante has be upped. Well, Media Cleaner Pro is no longer the standard, Telestream's Episode is in the game and we're back to seeing fast acceleration cards to speed things up.

Any of the Nvidia cards with CUDA can now help speed up H.264 Sorenson encodes. However, the results seen in Jan Ozer's sample images show something only a third grader would be proud of. We've been using the Matrox CompressHD H.264 acceleration card and it works amazingly well. Any of the videos that I have compressed for ourselves have all used this card. See a sample.

The iPad

At a business meeting recently, we all sat down and quickly noticed that everyone had an iPad on the table. The folks in the meeting were some of the top gurus in the industry. Wow. Game changer. Encoding iPad compatible video is now more important than ever. Sorenson Squeeze 7 makes it easy, not just for iPad, but by offering simple Presets for WebM. If the stats in the meeting are in fact true, 1 out of every 5 videos is being viewed on a mobile device. We'll need to change our approach, acknowledge these viewers and quickly adopt a new workflow standard. Adobe is also one to watch with Scene7 and Brightcove is coming back all guns blazing. You'll notice that Sorenson is offering Sorenson360 as well.

AWS
This is one of the biggest timesavers for us, I love being able to publish to "the cloud" directly. We have been using Amazon Web Services to host our videos with perfect delivery and huge cost savings. Previously when we left the office for the evening with videos encoding, we would have to Remote Access in later that evening to check the files and manually move them to AWS. Not anymore, just enter in your login/secret key and let them upload as the encoding is complete.

Overall it looks like a few features are going to make Sorenson Squeeze 7 a must have. Everything else is just icing on the cake. Jump over to the Sorenson page and read up a bit. Download the free trial http://www.sorensonmedia.com/video-encoding/