Month: May 2015

There are two things that matter to me with a compression tool: output quality and file size. I have long championed Sorenson Squeeze simply because the results looked better for fewer megabytes than everything I had tried, including all of the popular free solutions and Adobe Media Encoder. Squeeze’s UI was never great and the program was sometimes buggy (v10 seems even worse, with ‘create unique all’ overwriting my old files), but the results were there.

However, times have changed for the FREE! There are free plugins and free software that provide similar if not better output. The only downside is a lack of consolidated queuing, which can admittedly be annoying but (to me) not worth $550.

Here is the software I use for encoding web video formats:

WebM: Check out fnord’s plugins for Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder. Free VP9 compression means your output will be much higher quality than Squeeze 10 Lite ($200), and comparable to Squeeze 10 Standard ($550). http://www.fnordware.com/WebM/

MP4: Handbrake has an icon that drives me insane, but I will forgive them for free x264 and x265 compression, with an open config terminal for any ffmpeg custom settings you’d also like to tack on. It runs super fast and the results trounce anything I’ve seen from Squeeze Lite’s MainConcept H.264.

OGV: The strangest, ugliest software of the bunch also produces some impressive results. Grab FireFogg, a browser plugin for Firefox that encodes OGV very well considering its limited options and minimal interface. Note that Firefox requires your extensions to be .ogg so you’ll have to rename the output.

If you are using Illustrator’s Pathfinder tool and you find that shapes are having their points mangled whenever you apply shape modes or pathfinders, realize this: the Pathfinder uses a ‘precision’ setting that rounds out your shapes. This precision is relative to the absolute measurement of points, so small shapes will get visually distorted while larger ones seem perfectly fine.

What’s the solution? Scale things up before you apply the Pathfinder, then scale them back down again. Make sure that Pathfinder hasn’t automatically checked the ‘align to pixel grid’ box on your edited shapes or you will find it distorting again once they return to a small size.

Javascript and jQuery give different values for window.outerWidth vs $(window).outerWidth(). In this case, you want to use plain old Javascript. It will include the scrollbar(s) if they exist, as opposed to jQuery which ignores them.