With all the dimension adjustments you will be making to your footage, you may find that you want to retrieve information about your source footage after importing it.

The proper pixel aspect ratio setting for NTSC footage is 4:3 (left) not square pixels (right). The wrong pixel aspect ratio settings add much more than 10 lbs. If you fall into the habit of using the Maintain Aspect Ratio option available in both applications, you can easily end up with video thatвЂ™s encoded with the wrong aspect ratio.ДЇigure 2. You are simply expected to know or calculate the necessary aspect ratio adjustments. Flix and the Flash Video Encoder donвЂ™t have aspect-ratio detection, automatic conversion, or default dimension settings to guide beginners. When you adjust the aspect-ratio settings in Squeeze, the on-screen preview adjusts itself and it becomes clear which one is the proper aspect ratio for your footage (see Figure 2). The newest version of Squeeze also gives you the ability to override the automatic aspect ratio adjustment and select one from a list of defaults, or specify your own. Squeeze makes an educated guess about your footage and attempts to adjust it to the right aspect ratio. When you compress video for Flash, it is often necessary to compensate for this difference by adjusting the aspect ratio of your source footage before compressing it! This is not an intuitive move for most beginners. If the same footage is displayed on computer screens with square pixels, the footage appears about 11% too wide (aspect ratio of approximately 4.4:3). The pixels on a television are not square-they are tall rectangles-so when 720 x 486 footage is displayed on a television, it appears with an aspect ratio of 4:3. DV camera footage and all footage for North American television display have pixel dimensions of 720 x 486. Flix and the Flash Video Encoder also allow explicit numeric dimension settings, but they donвЂ™t help beginners by providing common defaults from which to select.ДЄnother important concept to consider when doing video conversion is aspect ratio. Squeeze doesnвЂ™t have the ability to apply ratio-based dimension constraints you must explicitly set numeric dimensions for your height and width, although common settings are provided. The Flash Video Encoder provides the same ability using a percentage setting, enabling a wide range of proportional outputs. In addition to proportional frame rate control, Flix allows you to output each video in a batch at the same height and width dimensions as the source clip instead of conforming all files to the same dimensions. Squeeze offers you two additional frame rate ratios from which to select-2:1 and 3:1-which are handy for easily encoding multiple versions of the same file at reduced frame rates to save file size. For example, when applied to a batch with a mix of 24 fps and 30 fps clips, the 1:1 setting encodes the 24 fps source clips at 24 fps and the 30 fps source clips at 30 fps. All three packages offer 1:1 ratio-based frame rate control, allowing output of each video in a batch with the same frame rate as the source file. You may want to run a batch process and output each FLV in the batch with the same specs as its source file instead of conforming each file in the batch to the same specs.

Proportional settings control is very handy for batch processing. In addition, SqueezeвЂ™s watch folders are a handy way to circumvent the 100 source file restriction of the Squeeze authoring environment (which you can also get around by creating multiple jobs). Watch folders allow you to apply encoding settings to a folder, so that when clips are subsequently added to the folder, Squeeze immediately begins compressing the new clips in the folder using the applied settings.

Sorenson Squeeze is the only application of the group to offer watch-folder encoding. Batch encoding clips with the Flash Video Encoder is even more awkward you must import a clip multiple times and apply settings to each imported instance to encode clips with multiple encoding settings. This means you must run sequential batch processes for each encoding setting you want to apply to your videos.

On2 Flix batch processing is more limited because you have to apply a single encoding setting to each batch of clips. The flexible batch-encoding workflow of Sorenson Squeeze is perhaps its greatest advantage. Multiple encoding settings can easily be applied on a job-wide basis or on a per-video basis. Sorenson Squeeze is built for batch processing.

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