The Editblog

The other day I had a bit of an Apple Compressor vs. Sorensen Squeeze smackdown and I didn’t even know it! After getting approval on an edit I authored a DVD and encoded my file via Compressor. The encode looked good except for one portion where I did a push-in move on one of the many still images used in the piece. There was a lot of flicker and artifacting on one particular shot. It was most noticable under the eyes of the subject of the picture:

If you look closely you can see a red line under the eye in the above image. Compare that to the original DV source:

This red artifacting produced a noticeable flicker as the picture move occurred. Rather than troubleshoot the encode settings (I used both the 90 minute DVD encode presets in Compressor) I ran the edit through Sorenson Squeeze. Using its default settings for DVD the problem spot looked good, though slightly darker:

Overall the Sorenson encode looked very good and seemed to have less artifacting. If you look closely (and you have to look very closely at this jpeg as it lost quite a bit on the conversion to this web image below) at a difference matte between the Compressor encode and the original video, the red line under the eye is very prominent:

Now we all know that DV resolution material compressed via MPEG for DVD delivery isn’t the best quality that can be had but it’s very common and can produce a good result. As I said I didn’t have a lot of time to troubleshooting and experiment with different bit rates and compression and such so this isn’t the most scientific test but what it did show me was that for that particular problem spot with a client waiting on delivery, Sorenson Squeeze came out on top.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Editing, Mac software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.