I've been using Sorenson Squeeze for as long as I've been cutting video on Avid editors. I still remember a reseller telling me a few years ago that "Squeeze doesn't work well with Avid" and I still shake my head at that. Simply because Squeeze was born to be used with Avid and the latest version just proves that again.

As with all things connected to the Rand/USD rate of exchange Squeeze has become vulgarly expensive so forking out the cash for a new Version 11 licence a few days ago was not fun. But my mood improved the moment I processed the first 7min MPEG4 clip. See, usually you set up a job, hit the Squeeze it! button and then go wash the car, the dog and then the laundry. My new workstation in combination with the vastly improved performance of Squeeze Desktop 11 Standard now means that I'll have a dirty car, a filthy dog and my shirts will all have spaghetti stains because sweet fireballs it's quick!



Squeeze 11 will really make maximum use of your available GPU resources. MPEG4 processing, the bulk of what I do every day, is much quicker than before. Also a number of new output formats have been added, including HTML5 video.



The cons of owning a Squeeze licence? Well, sadly the pricing. Damn... But other than that this is a must-have tool if you do serious post production work and value your time. Integration with Media Composer is good, although I find myself setting up compression jobs manually most of the time just because I like to double and triple check my settings. I'm weird that way, I know.

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