By John Virata
One of the new features in Sorenson Squeeze 4.5 is the capability to
burn a DVD of your video content directly from Squeeze. This is an obvious
timesaver for those who just need to quickly get content on a DVD for review
purposes, archiving, other reasons. You won't have to go into a dedicated DVD
authoring tool, but you also don't have access to fancy menus and other niceties
that DVD authoring tools provide.
But for quick DVD burning, why leave the video compression tool if you
don't have to? Here is how to do it. For this tutorial, I used footage from the
Mater Dei High School choir. The choir director wanted to see some raw footage
so I put it on a DVD in Squeeze 4.5.
Your first task is to launch Squeeze 4.5 and import the files you want
to burn to DVD using Squeeze. Click the Import File icon (or go to
File>Import Source) in the input window and select the file(s) you wish to
import into Squeeze. The video now appears in the batch tree. Next, from the
Format and Compression Settings, select the MPEG-1 or 2 setting you wish to
compress the video file to.
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| Importing source material |
Your choices here range from VCD and PowerPoint Hi and Lo, to Blu-Ray
and HD DVD. In this case, select DVD_NTSC_Lg which is the high quality preset
setting. You can also choose PAL if you need to create a PAL DVD. If you want to
create a VCD, select that preset, and so forth. Click the Apply button, or drag
the preset to the Job window and drop it onto the video name. In this case my
video, italy_with_strings02 is a bit dark, so we added a lighten filter.
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| Lighten filter applied |
This is where the before/after slider comes into play because now you
can see how the lighten filter will affect the video. Any part of the video can
be previewed with the filter to get a better gauge on how the filter will affect
any portion of the clip. You can do the same if your videos are too dark or
light, or just leave them as is. Click the preset in the batch tree and right
click it. Select Modify Optional Tasks. Choose Copy Output to DVD Burner.
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| Copy output to DVD burner |
Select any other presets in the batch tree and do the same. Now
you can burn straight to 4.7GB DVD media from Squeeze. The current 8.5GB DL
media is not yet supported in this release, but will hopefully be supported in
the next update of the application. If you are a heavy Squeeze user and need to
frequently put videos onto DVD for playback but don't necessarily need to author
a DVD, Squeeze 4.5's new capability will enable you to quickly and easily
acquire video, compress it, and burn it to DVD for playback all from within
Squeeze.
