Microsoft Expression Encoder: A Very Underrated Tool

Having experienced the positive results during a big project several months ago, a blog on this topic is overdue. Although it wasn't the one I originally intended on exploring this month, thanks to a colleague who recently needed a quick and efficient way to encode and scale down the large video asset he needed for one of his multimedia projects, I remembered to finally write about it. There are several reviews and tutorials (such as:
http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2010/09/17/expression-encoder-4-pro-for-silverlight-video-players.aspx) on Expression Encoder 4 and this isn't one of them. Rather, this brief blog o' mine is to simply mention and share my positive experience and reaction to this product's capabilities.
 
With extensive experience in Video Editing & Motion Graphics,  I am accustomed to the usual suspects namely Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere and/or Avid Media Composer for post-production. I have relied on these staple applications to compress my video files to the smallest file size I could possibly get them to using standard codecs such as AVI, WMV, Sorenson and recently, MPEG 4. So, when the opportunity to work on a huge Motion Graphics projects came to the UX Services group, I found myself wrestling with these same programs in trying to compress my output files with not very much luck in either or both the file size and quality departments. Without much options left, I found and tried Expression Encoder 4 as a last resort and was very surprised and impressed with its  easy-to-use interface and H.264/MPEG 4 AVC codec's clean output quality and very reasonable filesize. That said, this software also comes with several Silverlight Player templates which could come handy if you're on a tight deadline.