I'm finding Sorenson Squeeze 5 on the PC one of the most frustrating applications I've ever had to use in my life.

I have a 1GB file rendered from Sony Vegas Pro 8 that I want to compress for Vimeo.

I've tried some of their "quick start" settings and although I end up with a wmv file of about 320MB that plays fine on my local PC the file won't successfully convert on vimeo and all I ever get is "Conversion failed" from Vimeo's server-side processing.

After reading Vimeo's own compression guide I decided to switch to "custom" settings based on the H.264 codec. That's even worse in that the resulting file (after four passes) only plays sound with no video on my local PC.

After several hours processing I've ended up with a 28MB file so I suspect that Squeeze is deciding to throw away the video for some reason and just keep the audio.

My "custom" settings are as follows. Can anyone advise what the problem is. The source video is 1280x720.

Total Data Rate: 5128 Kilobits/Sec
Format Constraints: None
Stream Type: Non-Streaming (Not Hinted)

AUDIO
Audio tickbox: checked
Codec: Coding Technologies aac
Data Rate: 128 Kbps
Sample Size: 16
Sample Rate: 44100
Channels: Stereo

VIDEO
Video tickbox: checked
Codec: MainConcept H.264
Method: Multi-pass (also tried 2-pass VBR - still no video)
Data Rate: 5000 Kbps
Frame Size: Same as Source (1280 W 720 H)
Frame Rate: 1:1 Frames/sec
Key Frame every: 240 frames
Auto Key Frame on Scene Change: ticked. Slider set to 50 midway between "Rare" and "Frequent"
AVC Profile: Baseline
Encoding Effort: Best
Slices: Auto

I'm not really sure where the hang-up is in your process since there are a number of things that could potentially go wrong.

Just on my initial perusal of your settings, 5000 kbps looks a little high for this type of distribution standard. You might try playing around in a lower data range, between 1500 - 3000 kbps range, you might likely find your sweet spot somewhere closer to 3000 kbps.

Also, I am wondering if there is a problem with the way that h.264 is working within the wmv wrapper. I am not too up to speed on the newest wmv system but I know that it can take a while to work out the bugs in the various wrappers when playing around with h.264.

Have you tried using the same settings but exporting out through a Quicktime .mov wrapper and trying to upload that to vimeo? There is a longer history of stability with h.264 in QT, so I'd be curious to see if that helps.

-Jon

Also, I see no reason to output your results in 1280 x 720 for uploading to vimeo. I would think it to be better to provide vimeo with a frame size and ratio in the same size that their own compressor system will output when it is done with it. With vimeo, that widescreen setting will be half what you are outputting. Set you output to 640 x 360. It will give you a much more practical file size for vimeo to start chewing on.

-Jon

Okay, one last post here:

Just read in vimeo support forums...

Set your output frame size to 844 x 480 at 3000 kbps.

Set your keyframe to every 30 frames instead of the 'every 240' you are currently using.

Hope this helps.

-Jon