Hi Editors:

                   I've been happily editing away on my new MC for close to one month now, and I must say that everything busted on AXP works perfectly on MC, thus I'm very happy with MC. However, once again, we're in agony here trying to get something out of of MC ! The culprit this time seems to be Sorensen Squeeze 4.5.x. Each time I attempt to send a sequence to Squeeze for web encoding, I get a crash to desktop. I tried clicking the repair option in the install/uninstall but nope ! Doesn't work ! I tried to completely uninstall and re-install, but nope ! Doesn't work ! Sorensen used to work well, but now it doesn't ! I tried to roll my system back to a date I remember it worked perfectly, but nope ! This doesn't fix anything ! Has anyone experienced this problem before ? I have a theory this may be some kind of Windows Runtime Error, but I don't know how to troubleshoot such a problem if this is even the problem. (??) Please advise.

Much thanx in advance,

 

Hi,

How are you sending to Squeeze?  (Send to command?  File>Export?  Something else?) 

What are you sending to Squeeze?  (QT reference?  QT movie?  Something else?) 

What is the material?  (SD?  HD?  What frame rate?) 

What are you having Squeeze make out of it?  (QT? WMV? FLV?  Something else?)

good luck,
Carl

camoscato:

Hi,How are you sending to Squeeze?  (Send to command?  File>Export?  Something else?)  What are you sending to Squeeze?  (QT reference?  QT movie?  Something else?)  What is the material?  (SD?  HD?  What frame rate?)  What are you having Squeeze make out of it?  (QT? WMV? FLV?  Something else?)

good luck,
Carl

 .....Hi Carl: I'm sending out to Send To>Encoding>Sorensen Squeeze. I am sending to Squeeze a QT Reference. The material is HD 720 p 30 ingested into an HD 720p 59.94 project(Strangely, there's no HD 720p30 selectable project in MC). I want squeeze to encode a Flash FLV (Otherwise I could output an WMV from inside of MC). I figured I would try Squeeze once again, since a later version was bundled in my MC upgrade.

Hi,

Ok, Squeeze crashes when you send from within MC.  What happens if you export a QT reference to the desktop, then open Squeeze and try encoding from there and see if it crashes.  The idea is to see if the problem is the communication between MC and Squeeze, or something in the QT reference itself that's causing the crash.

good luck,
Carl

 I have the same problem periodically.  I've tried narrowing it down to different ways.. i.e. export as same as source, QT reference.. But haven't come up with anything conclusive.  The one thing that seems to stay constant is that it seems to crash when it starting to "flatten" the file.   I end up getting a file called "non-hinted" that works, but I don't think it is optimized to streaming.

Hi Carl:

              Nope ! It's not working ! I'm back in the dog house once again. We can only output about 50% of our projects because we absolutely must output to web formats ! Now we can't ! I tried to output a seperate QT Ref and import that into Squeeze but it just crashes out to desktop. I'm really not diggin this at all. I will try to export different file formats and try to import those as well, but I think I'm wasting my time here. I can't afford to waste my time either. I need to work !

 What version of QT do you have? 7.4 is bad for recent MCA 2.7+ and 4.5 Squeeze combinations. If you have QT 7.4, roll back to 7.3. There's a fair amount of posts on the boards about this with the sometimes mysterious link to find this. (for example you can link on my post history about this) 

You may have said this, but in Squeeze what format are you trying to output? But don't bum out on Sorensen. It's a great program when you get into it. And in fact, you should be able to call them and they'll help you out. Good luck. I've been in your shoes and it's frustrating.

Fazz Powell:

But don't bum out on Sorensen. It's a great program when you get into it.

 

....Hi Fazz. I rolled my system back using my built in HDD snapshot restore program by HP. I am encoding away happily with Sorensen 4.5.7. Frankly, I have had nothing but trouble with Sorensen ever since I first installed it last year when we purchased AXP 5.6.0. I have found Squeeze to be very buggy and unstable since version 4.3, then 4.3.3, then 4.5, now 4.5.7. Also, I am rather surprised at the compressed file sizes of WMV files you get with this program. The resulting encodes yield file sizes of an unacceptable ratio and size.

...Regarding my Squeeze fix, I am not 100% sure, but I have a working theory that some (or all) hard drive junk file cleaners may be playing a part in my Sorensen woes. I haven't been able to prove this yet, but I can't help but wonder if some junk file clearners don't also chip away at your good files ? Now, I would have thought this problem would be solved by a simple repair or re-installation of Squeeze, but if there is a missing file or corruption of a Windows file needed to run Squeeze, then this will need a system roll back to repair. So we're fine until the next time we make some unperceived false move with our system which may punish us !

 I dunno dude, but it sounds like you have other issues afoot on your system. There are a ton of folks using Sorensen night and day with great success. I have no idea what a "junk file cleaner" is. As for our WMV file size.. check your keyframes settings, don't make these too short/frequent, and one would assume you know about your data rates. Squeeze can create great WMP files. Compression is an art, and takes a lot of trial and error when finding the sweet spot in your settings. And like I said before... call Sorensen, they won't bite. Good luck.

Fazz Powell:

Squeeze can create great WMP files. Compression is an art, and takes a lot of trial and error when finding the sweet spot in your settings.

 

...Uhh, I never claimed Sorensen made poor quality WMV files. On the contrary, Squeeze produces excellent quality, but at the cost of file sizes which are, in my opinion unrealistically large. I agree that compression is an art, but I have had no success at finding any "sweet spot." If I reduce the data rate, then the resulting files look like crap, if I use the presets in Squeeze, then the files look amazing, but they're way too big !

....As far as my system goes, I beg to differ. I use a 100% Avid certified system. A HDD "junk" file cleaner is also known as a disk cleaner. You know ? To clean up all the temp files and other files which can build up on your system drive and thus slow things down a little. I don't really care about the "ton of folks" using Sorensen without difficulty. I care about the misery we've had to endure at the hands of Sorensen not working on a system which has been very carefully checked to be in 100% working order to Avid specs. I recently checked my system with Avid tech support just to be sure my system was not the culprit. Well, I rolled my system back and now Squeeze is working again I would think something with either my Windows OS got modified, or something got corrupted or deleted. (??) This can happen. The thing which bugs me about this, is I didn't learn anything here. Why did Squeeze suddenly head South on us ? As I already wrote, this isn't the first time Squeeze has crapped all over us. I think I will do a complete system restore to manufacturer's factory condition and then do a fresh install of Media Composer and Avid Studio Toolkit, Boris Compendium Complete AVX, Squeeze 4.5.x and take a HDD snap shot of that.

 Sorensen's operation has nothing to do with your computer being Avid compliant, or not. These products are made by 2 different companies and rely on a 3rd party, QuickTime, for full functionality. Avid just happens to bundle Sorensen with your Avid application. And if you're freaked out about the file size of your WMPs, then use something else, but don't bash Sorensen because you don't know how to use it. The file sizes created by Sorensen are perfectly fine. This is a good educational resource DVD:

http://store.creativecow.net/p/64/internet_killed_the_video_star

It sounds like you're going to rebuild our entire computer to solve this issue instead of calling Sorensen. Dang. Good luck.

Laptopeditor:

I care about the misery we've had to endure at the hands of Sorensen not working.... this isn't the first time Squeeze has crapped all over us.

Hi Mark,

Why don't you try something else?  Many people prefer Canopus Procoder to Squeeze, and if you don't like Procoder, there are other choices for file conversion.

Laptopeditor:

I think I will do a complete system restore to manufacturer's factory condition and then do a fresh install of Media Composer and Avid Studio Toolkit, Boris Compendium Complete AVX, Squeeze 4.5.x and take a HDD snap shot of that.

I'm with Fazz on this.  Restoring the machine to factory default and reloading everything because Squeeze isn't working is like swatting flies with a Buick. 

However, if you do choose to go this route, my suggestion afterward would be to quit running "hard drive cleaners" on the system.  You got an Avid certified system because you wanted to avoid problems so you could work.  Tweaking and poking it with third party drive cleaners is just going to make it upset.  If the system is running slow, run the Windows drive cleaning utilities that are built into XP (on the system drive only, not the media drives).

good luck,
Carl

p.s. I'm not trying to pimp Procoder; I use Squeeze because it came with Xpress and it works fine for me.

Carl and Fazz, it may be that in Mark's case the safest thing to do is a complete system rebuild.  Hard disc cleanup utilities can remove application files that haven't been used in a while but may still be necessary, they can get into and modify the registry in unexpected ways, and they can generally jeopardise system stability.  Running them needlessly is a little like taking antibiotics because you might be going to be sick in the future.  At best it's pointless, at worst it can be harmful.

Once you have a clean stable system up and running, leave it that way.  Turn off Windows update and only perform any updates when you have full control of the process.  I suspect that once you get stability in your Windows install a lot of other nebulous and intermittent "bugs" will also vanish.

we use both procoder and squeeze, we've had a few issues with DNx material but you may find some help on the sorenson website;

http://secure.sorensonmedia.com/pages/?pageID=7

 

 

jwrl:

Carl and Fazz, it may be that in Mark's case the safest thing to do is a complete system rebuild.  Hard disc cleanup utilities can remove application files that haven't been used in a while but may still be necessary, they can get into and modify the registry in unexpected ways, and they can generally jeopardise system stability.

 

Good point, John.  I hadn't thought of that.

jwrl:

Once you have a clean stable system up and running, leave it that way.  Turn off Windows update and only perform any updates when you have full control of the process.  I suspect that once you get stability in your Windows install a lot of other nebulous and intermittent "bugs" will also vanish.

Completely agree.

good luck,
Carl