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Review
Installation & Documentation
Ease of use
Value for money
Price approx.	$495 USD
Software/Hardware Requirements	G4 or G5 512 MB RAM Mac OSX 10.3+ QuickTime 7
Available from	Popwire.com

First published in New Zealand Macguide Magazine - Issue 23

I'm going to get this off my chest early and then I'm going to concentrate more on the application itself. Compression Master 3.1 is a program that, for almost $500 USD, could look a little more inviting. I know it's a very powerful program, but there's no reason why it can't both look good on a Mac and be moderately intuitive to use.

I'm very much a person that likes to open an application and get stuck in, to become familiar with it before I start to get in deeper to the program or the documentation. But back when I reviewed Sorenson Squeeze (Issue 20) I commented that "the interface isn't all that stunning", but I feel like I owe Sorenson a slight apology. Kinda.

It isn't that CM3 is an unattractive program. It's just that there is little there to help you grasp what it is you need to do, and in fact, the greatest benefit for me when using CM3, was that I had used Squeeze and could see a lot of similarities.

What I mean by this is that I think it would be very easy to be confused when first starting to use CM3. If hadn't had previous experience, I would have been lost. And when you use a program of this sophistication and go up to the "Help" menu, only to be told, "There is no Help", then you're not going to warm to the program quickly.

CM3 is available as a 27 MB download. The small size of the product disguises the fact that this is a powerful and moderately expensive product at around $400 USD. Installation is very easy, but you're going to want to grab the manual (a 113 page document) and have a good read when you first install. Although I also think the manual let me down at times, confusing images and terminology about the interface. That's the biggest issue for me. When it talks about the "Settings Manager", when all I can see is "Settings" and that "Batch" and "Batches" appear to be two different things, you start to feel that the program is hiding its true potential.

CM3 is divided up into a left pane that is compromised of three sections. The Bookmarks section is a way of selecting certain folders to always be instantly accessible from within CM3, although I'm not sure if "Bookmark" is the best term here and this should not be confused with the concept of drop or watch folders, which these aren't.

The Settings Manager is where the wide range of preset encoding options are available from, interestingly separated into their own sub-folder known as "Templates". Finally is the "Batches" section which I never really got round to using.

Second impressions have me confused also
The main area of the program is also referred to as the "Batch" but I prefer to think of it as the encoding area. Here you can drag and drop (or select from your bookmark folders) files that you want to encode into different formats or apply filters to.

Once you've dragged your file onto the encoding area, you can then go into the settings folder and drag across as many different encoding presets as you want, so that you can output a variety of formats and files at varying encoding rates.

Like Squeeze, clicking on these settings in the encoding area (sorry, I'm not going to use "Batch") allows you to fine tune or alter presets to more specific requirements. Like Squeeze, I think programs like this run into a slight issue at this point. You're taking a preset, applying it to a file and then altering a setting within that preset. So are you altering the preset or creating something new based upon it? The answer is the latter and I think CM3 makes this slightly more obvious than Squeeze does, by changing the overall name of the project from the preset to "Untitled". That might seem vague, but you don't want an altered preset still being called by its original file. Again, this could all be improved.

The window that appears when you want to alter settings is very much more aligned to Cleaner than Squeeze and looks great and is easy to use. I felt very comfortable in this section of the program. I also think the preview screen is much more straightforward than in Squeeze and I could easily set in and out points for my file from this section.

The encoding process itself is very easy and just a matter of clicking a "Play" button (although "Go" might be more appropriate) and then a small 'fuel gauge' appears to let you know the progress of your encoding. I found the fuel gauge itself a little confusing as it has two lines and multiple shades (it goes across in grey and then gets covered by a black line later) and while giving visual feedback is useful, it seemed slightly un-Mac like.

Settings can also be saved into files, which can be shared by other users or can be used in conjunction with Popwire's Compression Engine. This is a server-based application that Popwire has available for corporations that might want a centralised encoding facility and whilst this is very impressive, it's still disappointing that for the price of Compression Master, the program doesn't include some form of rudimentary watch folder facility.

When things do go wrong with CM3, the program can be less than helpful and in some cases, downright frustrating. A preference setting for the application lets you determine how many times it should try to output and encoded file before giving up if an error results. I had it set at 3 attempts, but then also set about getting CM3 to output 4 different formats of a file. When an issue came up with each of the files I was trying to produce, CM3 tried 3 times for each format and failed. I ended up with 12 files on my desktop from failed encoding attempts and the cryptic message "Job died (10) after 3 retries" for each.

Of course, I assumed that tracking down what the "(10)" meant would help me, but whilst the documentation mentioned error codes, it didn't list them. So I was stuck with 12 files that played moderately well, and an application giving me an error that the manual and Popwire website didn't provide information on.

Power lies behind the facade
The makers of the program promote the fact that it has been written from the ground up using native OS X code. It's speed and performance reflects this, as I was very impressed with how quickly it got through a large batch of encoding presets that I applied to a 2 minute DV file. Having had used both Squeeze and the FLV exporter that comes with Flash MX 2004 Professional recently, I was very impressed with the quality and size of the Flash FLV and SWF files that CM3 produced.

The program includes a wide range of filters that can be applied once you determine what encoding format your output is to be. Filters include frame rate conversion, deinterlace, resize, noise reduction, black and white restoration, contrast, smoothing, gamma correction, audio equalizer, watermark and fade in and out.

I was pleased with the preview window functionality in the program, including the ability to instantly see the effect that applying a filter would cause, through the use of a sliding "Before/After" bar that appears on the preview window, showing one side before the filter is applied and one side after.

For those wanting to go well beyond computer or video encoding, the program also features options to encode in 3GPP and 3GPP2 formats for mobile phones

For those wanting very powerful encoding I have no doubt that Popwire may meet your needs, but you're going to find that a lot of learning goes into to using it. The developers of the program need to spend some time ignoring the superb encoding engine they have developed and focus on simple usability. When the manual and website seem to contradict each other over whether the application can or can't encode in H.264 format (when in fact I think they just mean it won't accept H.264 as a source format), when terminology used seems to be slightly at odds with what you are looking at, that there are sections of the program you just seem to never end up using or that there are section you use but are well hidden, then there still is obviously some work to do.

To me, I think Compression Master 3 is a very serious contender to Sorenson Squeeze. It's just that I'm not sure I feel that comfortable using it.

Published by kind permission NZ Macguide - © Parkside Media

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