Compressor App Reviews

Looks great but it takes double the time to transcode to h264. I am baffled on what is happening and I have tried everything to get the speed that it used to have but no success. I transcode about 6 2-4 hour 1080i timelines from FCPX a week so this is a big deal to have the performance drop to half.

I’ve looked at this product from arms length for many years thinking it was the solution to my compression needs. It’s absolutely horrible at compression. It’s incredibly slow and does not function anywhere near a tool like it should. If you purchase this, you will be wasting your money.

I’ve used Compressor for years and loved it more and more with each passing upgrade. This most recent version has soured me to the point that I need to speak up. The new version of compressor features some welcome upgrades, but a lot of them are not rooted in the reality of what most video editors are dealing with on a a day to day basis. Take the new color management tool. Not a bad idea in theory, but in practice the constraint in options leaves it virtually useless for most work. Rec709 to Rec2020? No one needs that and if they do they’re not using compressor for their color work. How about Rec709 Legal Range to Rec709 Full Range? Or 2.4 to 2.2 gamma shifts? The biggest problem I see is that the automatic settings are getting too unwieldy. Gone are the days I can just drop a video in, apply a preset and walk away. I have on more than one occassion seen Compressor select 1-2-1 for the source color profile and completely decimate the color grade of something I’ve been encoding. There’s 5 hours down the drain. Or more recently when I dropped a widescreen (2048x858) video file into Compressor for conversion to Blu-Ray. Prior to this most recent release Compressor would have selected 1080P as my output setting by default. Only after delivery to my client did I fine that in the most recent version of Compressor, the software has determined that 720P would be a much better setting. Clickboxes now fade up and down in the interface. I’m nearly at a loss for how terrible a UX decision this is. I need to work fast. The UI needs to be responsive. Period. Compressor has been a huge time saver in the past, but now I feel I have to watch it like a two year-old.

HAVE USED THIS PROGRAM FOR YEARS WITHOUT PROBLEMS. THE CURRENT UPDATE ON OCTOBER 2016 MAKES RENDERING A VIDEO OUT OF FCPX SO SLOW IT IS ALMOST WORTHLESS FOR SOMEONE DOING VIDEOS OF ANY LENGTH OR DOING VOLUME WORK. A 3 HOUR VIDEO THAT USED TO TAKE 1-2 DAYS NOW TAKES A WEEK.

This is the most disappointing companion app for Final Cut Pro X for professional movie production. Basically, compressor allows you to take a movie and export it as a final movie. I just completed a small 35 minute movie in 720p at one of the highest settings that took 12 hours to complete! This is insanely slow. All of my plans for the day are completely ruined because of the slow performance of this app! The inspector is the place to tweak the settings for the hidden export options from each preset! The inspector is the only reason I would recommend this app, but beware of how slow it runs! Buyer Beware!

Compressor used to be a great program with lots of power features. This version is impossible to use. It’s slow to open, slow to load in a file (as in several minutes to open a file), makes you dive into menu after menu on things that used to be so easy, and just overall cumbersome. It’s a very watered down version of what compressor used to be missing all of the old attention to detail. Rendering out is even slower (used to be much quicker). Just shows how much apple is moving away from the pro video user base.

This Compressor update seemed really nice at first, but now I am left with no other versions of compressor trying to get this one to work..and guess what..it still doesn’t work. There’s no sense in having to bring in a video file to FCPX simply to export it as another codec. Please get the kinks worked out.

I have never seen this slick new interface anywhere but here in the app store because Compressor 4.1 has crashed on startup EVERY TIME I’ve tried it. Exhaustive research hints that it is a conflict with my Matrox card. But ever after Uninstalling all my Matrox software, it still won’t launch. In fact, it usually crashes Final Cut Pro. And thanks to this new way my computer has of upgrading things behind my back (Thanks, Mavericks!) I have no idea how to go back to the old version. Compressor 4.1 is a fiasco. (As is Mavericks, in my opinion.)

Trying to do distributed rendering of a video file makes this hang in “Waiting” forever. (I killed the “distnoted” manually after 30 minutes, cancelling a job doesn’t work). This was on a file that FCP X exported locally in a few seconds. I have no idea why it’s not possible to do distributed rendering, not possible to cancel a job and not possible to get any sort of decent error messages from this thing when distributed rendering fails. The previous versions haven’t been any better either. And yes, my computers do show up in Compressor -> Preferences -> Shared Computers. Oh, and I’m using Mavericks 10.9.1 on all my systems, not some weird old OS X version or similar. I doubt that whoever programmed this has tested and debugged it properly.

On the files that I’m encoding 4.1 has been faster than previous versions, but it fails everytime I send a larger file from FCP 10.1.1. Very frustrating to wait an hour only to have the encode fail. It works only if I first export the file from FCP to another drive and then send that exported file to Compressor. Sending a large file from FCP to compressor has failed every time.

After upgrading to Mavericks (or is it the exploding Pinto?) the update to Compressor 4.1 came next. Big mistake. Crashes every time. Unistalled and reinstalled. Same result. Totally worthless. Why isn’t Apple on this issue? Money back? Useful update? A hint on how to get this app working from the source? There is nothing in compressor support to help.

I send toCompressor and add an output and CRASH! to a data screen i have no idea what the data is about But I do know 4.1 has never worked. 4 was great. Waiting for update while searching for help that may expail waht to do next. Scott

Compressor has always been a necessary addition to Final Cut Pro. I was dissapointed when Final Cut Pro X came out that Compressor didn’t get a facelift. Finally compressor’s layout makes sense to me. It also performs better and processing over a network is easier to setup than ever before.

Honestly, It’s always been slow. Outputting a Master file and compressing with FFMPEG through iFFMpeg GUI is faster. A 00:02:30 clip at 720p takes 15 minutes in Compressor, while it takes just 3 mins in FFMPEG.

I spent all day trying to get distributed processing to work to no avail. On older iterations in 32bit mode, i was able to peg the 8+ processors at 100% and chew thru renders. Not anymore. Seems to work for some people, doesn’t for many, check the boards. Distributed and accelerated processing (pegging the cores) is all i (would) use it for; it’s far more efficient to work inside of FCPX for all other outputs (~shares~).

it is very very slow i have been complete 24 hours for one project and up to now not complete.

I wish this software was as reliable as the old verison of Compressor 4. When I open it and select a batch, it beach balls for a few secodnds. When I try to delete the batch, it often beachballs and freezes. The reason why I’m trying to delete batches and try to resubmit is because when I submit batch often times it freezes and never submits the batch to process. I’m running a 12 core Mac Pro so the computer is not the problem. All reliablility went out of the window with this update and I really wish I could have the old version back because this software no longer works properly. Buyer beware.

Compressor has promise to be a useful tools but for me the primary reason to use it is to speed up rendering from FCPX. So after combing the Web I find out that direct move of files from FCPX to Compressor appears to disable the ability to use a cluster to render. So the only way to do it is render the whole video in FCPX and then bring into Compressor. This is extremely annoying as it takes me more time sitting in front of the computer waiting for one process so I can start the next one. The other thing that makes this really annoying is Compressor is the slowest application I have used on my Mac. I’m scared to tweak anything once I have set up a job because if I do I have to wait a really long time before it responds again. I’ve tried this on several Macs with varying configs, all with 16-32GB of RAM and nothing else going on. It’s the application - not the machine. So overall , lots of promise but it just doesn’t feel very useful right now. I will say it burned Blueray disc easily so that was nice.

When you need it. no joy… Then you futz with it and comb through support article after support article, remove Library/Prefs files (thereby resetting everything you’ve configured), get it working again, only to have an update come along and fudge it up all over again. Rinse and repeat... This is bad… It’s like Windows Redux, but on a Mac…

Still not the fastest, but simple and easy to setup and use. The new layout is a major upgrade from the previous version.