Compressor App Reviews

This new version is very fast !

ATTENTION cette version de compressor ne permet pas d’exporter du H264 en entrelacé. Pour un logiciel pro… c’est un comble ! This version of compressor does not allow an exporter of the H264 interlaced. It is incomprehensible for a professional software. Almost no television is progressive in Europe !

The software works pretty slow, the user interface is not apple like in terms of intuitional usage and on top freezes quite often. Please Apple, as soon as possible revise Compressor completely!

Finally compressor has become a “modern” Apple app. The simplified structure was long over due. I am glad that it finally got updated. Now all that is missing, is a more cluster stability and we are back to five stars.

Shame on you, Apple!!! App starts but fails when starting to convert. Claimed my money back!

It makes me angry actually to see so many problems and bugs in a piece of software like this. I remember Compressor in the good days when Apple was relevant in video. This thing only works once in a while, watermarks only work sometimes, droplets don’t work, autoimating is not intuitive, file management is horrible. Not the Apple company I used to know before.

In general quite good but it’s really slow on my Macbook Pro 13 (2013). Some freeware programs offer much higher transcoding speeds. That maybe a result of the IRIS graphics but it’s nearly unusable for me. On top of that I can’t believe that some menus are not even optimised for retina displays. WTF, is this a bug or just sloppiness on the developers side?

The previous version of compressor had a very poor user interface when using multiple computers. I paid my money in the belief that version 4 would improve this situation. It has not!!! It is the same program repackaged in such a way that the interface has no changes and the ability of using multiple computers requires you to to start this application on each computer that you wish to put into a cluster. The previous version allowed the rendering engines to work in the background. This is not possible now. I cant believe how backward this is. Where are people like Bill Atkinson when you need them. He would never approve of this user interface. Apple has lost its way. Go back to your roots. This is very dissapointing coming from Apple.

Even though were Production Premium users now, Compressor still has some compelling features and advantages over its quicker, but less capable, competitor (AME) Despite still being 32-bit and despite a very schizophrenic interface (now that batch monitor has been supplanted by an FCPX-like "Share Monitor"), the media encoding options are still superior when compared to AME; mainly the rate-control tools, video scaling options, and de-interlacing/reverse-telecine options. There was a time when an encoding tool like this cost $1K on its own (think Discreet.) While Compressor has gotten long-in-the tooth, its still a reliable workhorse when it comes to targeted media delivery options. Plus, if you buy Compressor (even without Motion or FCPX) you get access to the ProRes codecs for all your other NLE/video apps. Yay!

I was hoping for an app which makes it easy to convert all my existing movies and at the same time being able to have an easy way to create the desired format from new FinalCutProX movies I create. First of all: the interface is ancient and could need some cleanup. It is bulky to use and seems to have missed the design upgrade the other components got. The old interface would still be acceptable but what is out of question not acceptable is the fact that it just does not work reliable. I have started to convert the first set of exisiting files and 2 out of 6 files fail to convert already. I can slide in the preview screen through the whole file and the conversion is running for a while before it fails. They even play without any problem i.e. with VLC. Hope this gets more stable in a soon to come update.

Ever since an update to the old compressor it stopped working for me. I posted about it in the Apple discussion forums and even received a call from someone at Apple trying to find out what the problem was. Well the problem ended up being that they never followed up and Ive been without this software for a LONG time now. So I just bit the bullet and bought the new version from the App Store… Yep, still doesnt work. Its VERY frustrating to see the Application is open, I have menus, I select things and nothing works. Im not sure if other people have had this problem but Apple couldnt do anything about it on the last version now Im stuck paying for something NEW that does the same thing… Hey Apple… REFUND FOR ME PLEASE

Previous versions (the ones that were part of Final Cut Studio) were more advanced feature wise. This is still a 32 bit app and seems to only use one of the eight available cores on my machine. Back in the day I moved to FCP from Adobe because it was a speed demon in comparison. Now Adobe blows this out of the water. I felt like I had just done a 10 year newer computer upgrade when I tried compressing my files with Adobe Media Encoder CS4 that I happen to have on my computer as well. I wish that I had just used that to start with and saved my $50. Youll probably find freeware that will do the job faster for you.

Final cut pro and motion… great apps. This is a good app but way to slow and not worth the price.

I have a 12 core Mac - and as soon as I upgraded to Mavricks, clusters and Qmaster stopped working. Be aware!

the new 4.1 crashes all the time. I do TV broadcasting and these kinds of upgrades (and the bugs and crashes) kills my productivity. upgrade is NOT recommended.

Hate is a pretty strong word, but I hate this version. I sincerely hope Apple makes it usable again soon. I can’t even get past the splash screen when I open the application or send anything to it from FCPX.

Lets be clear because of Final cut X i moved to Premere, however, i still use this peach of a converter. I truly do love it… now only if they supporeted cuda cores

I used Compressor version 3 for many years as a Pro User. Compressor version 4 is a step backward for the power user. Two main issues so far. 1) Currently using Compressor version 4.1.1 on 3.4GHz i7 with 24 GB of RAM. Compressor will only allow me to run one instance. I am basically wasting about 40% of my CPU cycles. Or, to put this another way, this current job of making screeners for a client will take 40% longer than it should. Previously with Quickcluster, i could max out the CPU. That is a lot of my time waiting for something that should be finished. 2) Compressor 4.1.1 has no batch function. You really only have one batch, you submit it and then it is gone. No way to build a batch and open it later to run. This is very useful when multiple users work an edit suite over different shifts. Also, if your mac crashes or you need to pick up the batch, that can no longer be done. Although I can see which files have been compressed in the “completed” tab, I cannot save a specific job out as a batch. It seems to me that the Pro Video software team at Apple is not talking to Pro Users. They have become so concerned with looks and “ease of use” (yes, I know, normally a good thing) that they have sacrificed power and speed. Come on Pro Video team, you can do better.

Apple Compressor 4.1.2 have a severe bug who broke Blu-ray creation please keep previous version 4.1.1 or wait for the next version update. The Apple FCP X forum about FCP X 10.1.2 and Compressor 4.1.2 is full of informations and nobody have found any solutions at the moment.

Compresses video twice as much as FCP, uses all my cores. Haven’t had a chance to play with the distributed encoding yet so I can’t comment on that.