I thought I read on here before that Cineform was now fully compatible with the latest Sorenson Squeeze, but I just got off the phone with Sorenson and they said all Cineform files do not work with Squeeze. What's the verdict? I'd like to buy and use both projects, but not sure what the compatibility is between the two. Thanks.

Last I checked Sorenson doesn't work well with any compressed AVIs. It would be nice if they would fixed that. There isn't much we can do as the failure appears on Sorenson's end -- however if we are doing something they don't like, it would be in everyone best interest to tell us.

Hey David, Thanks so much for the clarification. Are there any other "high quality" encoders out there that work good with Cineform files? Specifically the encoders that have really nice H.264 with 2-pass VBR?

You mentioned Sorenson doesn't like compressed AVI's... what about the .mov Cineform files.. same thing?

TmPGenC works very well with Cineform avi files.

Gildo,
Thanks for the feedback, yes we like TMPEGEnc.

Deke,
Yes, CineForm MOV work, sorry I should have remembered to tell you that. Sorenson is a QuickTime based application so CineForm MOVs work well.

Hey David, then it seems that everything will work out just fine with Sorenson Squeeze as long as I use the MOV wrapper, correct? Any other hiccups with Sorenson using the .mov CFHD that I should know about?

Thanks so much for your help too. It's nice to see a representative "out amongst the people" lending a helping hand. Says a lot for Cineform.

Do you guys happen to recommend tmpeng's H.264 over Sorenson's?

Thanks so much again!

Sorry I don't use Sorenson other than trying to debug it. Get the free tiral to test it out.

Deke... I'm a big fan of TMPEGenc as well, but for H.264, I go straight to the source, Quicktime Pro. I have never been able to replicate the data/performance of the presets of QT7 with TMPEGenc or Premiere.

Not being a Sorensen user, I can't make a comparison to Squeeze however.

When I need an H.264 output, or any other .MOV clip, I render an uncompressed .MOV from Premiere, load into Quicktime, then export to the specs I need.

For $30, (Quicktime Pro upgrade), it's hard to go wrong.

Quicktime h.264 is a messy, compromised version of the 'real thing'. I'd personally only use it if the target viewer's only h.264 decoder is the Quicktime Player (which unfortunately is the majority of people on Mac and Windows).

It takes a while to set up properly but the open source x264 encoder with the MeGUI front-end supports many different h.264 profiles (I believe QT doesn't even support high profile), and even has a QT profile which disables many of h.264's features so the streams work in QT player and produces better results than Quicktime Pro. And it's $30 cheaper too!

Richard... if I follow your post correctly, then there is a more robust and free method of encoding to H.264?

That's good to know, but what I should have made more clear in my comment is that the nice thing about QT7 Pro is the ease of utilizing the presets to produce very good clips.

My need for Quicktime is only to provide clean previews via email or online. I don't want to have to wrestle with all the variables.

What do you mean by messy?

What I mean is that it's h.264 'lite' - a lot of the functionality of the codec has been omitted, maybe to keep the speed up, maybe because the coding isn't very good (certainly there are far, far superior software h.264 decoders available).

But in your situation I'd stick to QT Pro as the learning curve to x264 is quite immense in comparison. The advantage is that you do have access to the full potential of the codec and even when it's emulating Quicktime it'll provide better results than QT Pro when quality truly matters.

I see what you're saying.

Am I correct in that the basis for H.264 is MPEG4, and H.264 is simply a "version" of MPEG4 modeled specifically for Quicktime?

Thread resurrection time!

Have there been any fixes for Squeeze to make it work with CineForm AVIs or is it still MOV only?

We haven't looked at Sequeeze since. I hope they have fixed the issue. Can you do any testing?

Using v4.5, I appear to be able to import an AVI and play it, but the tool then crashes when you attempt to encode into a final deliverable. CineForm MOVs are absolutely fine though.

This seems to indicate no change from the version discussed earlier. Does any one else have any different news?

Using v4.5, I appear to be able to import an AVI and play it, but the tool then crashes when you attempt to encode into a final deliverable. CineForm MOVs are absolutely fine though.

This seems to indicate no change from the version discussed earlier. Does any one else have any different news?

I have exactly the same experience. Usually I use Cleaner XL 1.5 to do batch encodes to multiple bitrates and formats from Cineform AVI files that I export from Premiere Pro CS3 w/ Aspect HD 5.

But Cleaner XL 1.5, which I like otherwise and have used for many years to do batch encoding is just *ridiculously* slow to encode flv videos. I am talking, like almost 10 hours to encode a 4 minute .flv at 1280x720 3500 Kbit video rate with a slight brightness and contrast filter used! I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I added a watermark like I usually do.

So I tried Sorenson 4.5 to see if it could now handle CF AVI files unlike the previous version 4.3. Like Richard said, it too crashes when trying to render. For now I am still saving some time by doing a batch conversion to rewrap my existing CF AVI files into CF .mov's with Cineform HDLink and then let the relatively speedy Sorenson 4.5 do the batch encode from those into high quality .flv with the ON VP 6 codec.