New Sorenson Squeeze 4... any early adopters?
 

Has anyone taken the plunge with Sorenson's new Squeeze 4? The v3 suite was just OK when I gave the trial a whirl, as it didn't allow for metadata or really fine-grained control. This one looks like everything I've been waiting for.

I'm a long time user of Cleaner 5 (Windows), and have happily been able to bill thousands of dollars of encoding time with it. It's an elegant tool, but unfortunately it doesn't do Windows Media 9 and the MPEG is slow and not great in terms of quality. I tried the upgrade to Cleaner XL, but it's very nearly worthless. It's buggy, it doesn't save settings right, the UI is horrible, it doesn't do Sorenson Pro right, and Discreet is clearly leaving it out to dry.

It's probably too early to tell (Squeeze 4 has been out for like two days!), but I'm curious to know if anyone has used it yet.

Jeff,

I purchased and downloaded the upgrade, but am having no luck getting the .dmg file to run. I currently have a registered version of Sorenson Suite 3, and have been reasonably satisfied with it. You can read my post here

If I ever manage to get this thing to operate, I'll post my impressions on this thread. I will tell you that I am not too wild about Sorenson "support"! If you have any suggestions to help me figure this out, please don't hesitate to let me know. Thanks!

Trust me... nothing could be worse than Discreet's support.

Looks like an inexpensive upgrade for me as an owner of the SV Pro codec, so I look forward to your impressions.

Had Squeeze 3 and played with the demo for awhile. Liked it's interface improvements, simplicity of use. Took the upgrade path for the suite @ 159.

Though 4 appeared to get better compression than 3, here's what someone more expert than I had to say:
http://www.uemedia.net/CPC/2-pop/article_9852.shtml

If you're upgrading it likely is a no brainer to go to 4.

New purchase, play with the demo, then go from there.

Allan

jeff, haven't you tried procoder? it's not perfect, but it blows the doors off of cleaner.

there is also a great support forum for procoder, at canopus.com.

not sure how it works with the mac codecs.

ProCoder doesn't have an inexpensive upgrade path from what I have. Seeing as how I only bill about a grand a year for compression, I don't want to kill half of my profit. :) It doesn't appear to do anything that Squeeze doesn't do, and for the $159 upgrade for owning SV3, I can live with that.

What a shame about Cleaner (on the Windows side, anyway). Discreet really left us out to dry on Cleaner XL. Heck, the first build used to crash on Avid reference QT's for me. Not good.