Compressor App Reviews

I bought the latest version of Compressor because I thought it would improve my workflow for uploading from FCPX to YouTube. There’s a built-in share to YouTube option, but Compressor must be worth another $50, right? I’m not so sure. It crashes constantly, and it doesn’t even have a built-in preset for YouTube 1080p. I’m disappointed with my purchase and I think I’ll be going back to the Share menu.

This version of Compressor could be a game changer… If it worked- The dependability of this with 4K content, direct from FCPX encoding, and customizing options is HORRIBLE. The core features have amazing potential but this program is so buggy you can’t depend on it. I actually think installing this made my FCPX run slower. Please Apple… Develop this app, we, the editors of world need you to step up to the plate and make a rock-solid compression program worthy of the glorious Mac Pro in which it resides.

I bought this to convert and retime an AVI for a professional presentation. Not only is it difficult to find the options to do this, but when I run it the jobs seem to hang, Activity Monitor says Compressor is not responding, and it is only using 1 of the 8 cores on my machine. Wow! I expected so much more from Apple. I wish they had a 30 day trial like Adobe and Sorenson; I would have known to not pay $50.

SUPER slow. Felt like forever to render out a 1080p file.

Great update! Addressed a few of the issues I was having! Can’t ask for much more than fixing the things that were broke for me. @iCrizzo

Just upgraded to v4.2 from v4.1.3 on a Mac Pro (mid-2010) running 10.10.3 and it immediately brought all of my work to a grinding halt. Compressor immediately freezes entire computer after launch. Eager to use the new features but now stuck trying to find a way to revert back to v4.1.3 until the issue gets sorted.

I have a “Late 2008” MacBook, with 8 GB of RAM, and a 480 GB solid state drive (my boot drive), and 320 GB SATA mechanical drive. Compressor is running flawlessly. In fact, I am writing this review while it works in the background. I’ve been using FCP for a very long time, and am very happy with it’s cuurent revision. I only wish I’d gone ahead and invested the extra $50 on compressor long ago.

I tested this looking for a replacement for Telestream Episode. Compressor 4 is a big improvement over Compressor 3 (which Id tried and discarded years ago as part of Final Cut Studio). The new UI is decent- a little confusing sometimes, but leaps and bounds ahead of Episode. The complete lack of video MP4 presets seemed odd- everything was MOV containers, even the video sharing services presets. My understanding is that theyre the same thing (to the degree that you can just change the filename and itll work), but creating a video file as a proper mp4 requred building a new custom preset from scratch. Speaking of presets, Fast Start (which is referred to as optimize for network use) is turned off by default in every built-in preset, including some where it should definitely be on. Lack of native WMV support is a potential issue, but Ive been transitioning lately to offering just MP4s and noone has complained. With hardware acceleration, its really fast. The first time I ran a test job I thought I was accidentally only processing the audio track or something. On my late-2013 MacBook Pro, a file that normally takes ~35 minutes in Episode or Handbrake (both using the x264 library), took three and a half minutes! With basically identical settings (x264: very slow preset, film tuning, CRF20 or 6Mbit 2-pass. Apple: 2-pass, 6Mbit), it takes one *tenth* the time. On a machine that doesnt support the hardware acceleration though, it was ridiculously slow. Using an early 2008 dual-quad-core Mac Pro which takes about the same time as the MBP using x264 libraries, Compressor with identical settings took an hour and forty minutes. Unfortunately, I could find no details available anywhere describing what systems support the hardware acceleration. The quality is very close, but I think not quite as good as x264 at the same bitrate when using the very slow preset and proper tuning. Fine detail suffered, although motion did seem a little less artifacty with Compressor. My girlfriend got tired of me asking her to squint at still frames as I toggled back and forth, so I think most people wouldnt be able to distinguish at reasonably high bitrates. Overall, well worth the fifty bucks for the speed and to be able to properly manage batch processing, IF AND ONLY IF you have one of the supported systems for hardware acceleration.

My initial attempt at this was disheartening, because Activity Monitor showed that compressing an HD iphone video only used 400% CPU on my six core Mac Pro (Mid-2010), so I quit and went over to Adobe Media Encoder (CS6) to do the job. My previous experience was nearly 100% usage on Compressor FCP 7 and AME CS6 applications. I repeated this today, letting Compressor run to completion. It completed faster than AME, even without the CPUs being totally used, Compressor requiring about 24 minutes vs 31 minutes for AME (CS6), even when using only 400% CPU. Another rendering done today used about 900% of 12 possible threads for a 640x480 encoding.

I have a 21.5-inch iMac, Late 2012, 3.1 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 512 MB 900 MHz GDDR5, running 10.11 (Compressor runs amazingly on this system) I’m a content producer for a company that sells multiscreen art for use in tv broadcasts, stage concerts, & various group services. When I create an asset (video footage or motion animation) I’m required to send in multiple sizes/versions of it. Compressor makes this so easy! Instead of creating each version on my own I just make one full size project in Motion and then send it over to Compressor. Ive setup custom presets in Compressor for each size: Triple Screen HD 3840x720, 29.97 fps, .mov, key frame every 5 frames, 0 cropping & padding Double Screen HD 2560x720, 29.97 fps, .mov, key frame every 5 frames, crop left-640, crop right-640 Single Screen HD 1280x720, 29.97 fps, .mov, key frame every 5 frames, crop left-1280, crop right-1280 Triple Screen SD 1920x480, 29.97 fps, .mov, key frame every 5 frames, crop left-480, crop right-480 Double Screen SD 1280x480, 29.97 fps, .mov, key frame every 5 frames, crop left-960, crop right-960 Single Screen SD 640x480, 29.97 fps, .mov, key frame every 5 frames, crop left-1440, crop right-1440 I add all six of these output presets to my file in Compressor, start the batch, and voilà! Compressor generates six correctly sized/cropped files. A metric ton of work has just been done for me. Compressor can also use multiple machines to process batches. Setting up a group of computers for collective batching is very straightforward. A+

the worst software ever $50.00 in the Trash I Like the idea tha this program promise alot, but my reaction went I purchase this was not good. Please stay with adobe. Final Cut Pro X. its realy good but this Compresor 4.2.1 software is not good. 10 Minutes on H.240 to Apple pro res 422 1440x1080 29.97fps takes 30 Minutes. This is not good Aboebe Media Ecoder takes 2.5 Minutes

I was looking for a program to embed a scc file into an MPEG-2 file for broadcasters and read that Compressor 4 could do the job. I figured I had to spend the $50 and try it out. Guess what, it worked! It was almost too easy. Much easier than I anticipated. From FCP > Send to Compressor, pick a template, duplicate it and and tweak your settings to customize. Attach the scc file and start the batch. A 30 minute 1080p epidode takes about 50 minutes running on my 2011 iMac 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 4GB RAM OS X Yosemite 10.10.5. Plus the file is only 3GB and it looks great. I don’t work for Apple or get paid by them to say this, but I’m unbeilievalby satisfied with this software knowing I can use this each week to distrute my content to dozens of TV stations for broadcast in HD with closed captioning. Exactly what I needed. Haven’t tried making any other files yet.

It will randomly pick one core/computer to run it on. never could make it run on more than one machine. it will sometime run on a remote machine in a cluster or sometime run on the local computer.

In my 20 years of pro film/video work few things have been more frustrating to master than video compression. Over the years Ive used them all, Sorenson, Cleaner, Blaze, MPEG Streamclip, etc, etc. Compressor has slowly risen to the top of the heap for nearly all of my compression tasks. If you learn Compressor inside and out, use a little math in your planning, make use of advanced features, and employ the proper codecs, Compressor simply cant be beat. It doesn’t matter if I’m compressing a small lo-res file for online reviewing by clients, or doing my final output to send a national TV show to the network, Compressor is the champ in ever metric I’ve tested. In the end, Compressor creates better looking encodes, with smaller final file sizes, and does it faster than any other compression software. If it didn’t, I’d use one of the other dozen softwares I have access to.

For years I avoided Crash-pressor because it wouldn’t finish compressions without failing about 20% of the time. This has changed of the last several releases. Now, my complaints are few: Compressor has really become solid and predictable. Most of my hangs now are from a dialog box that will spawn behind the main window. The lack of a few recent codecs is likely do to licensing. Not the last word in automation, true, but for a SMB house it does the trick! Oh, $49 bumped my review from 4 to 5. There is nothing close for the price. I have some free tools that approach the power of Compressor but not the ease of use. $49 for this is one of the things that keeps me on a Mac!