Compressor 4+

This program gets the short end of the stick. As it is not very flashy and does not try to impress anyone with it’s interface.

But for an encoder, its great.

I can totally see why that is counter intuitive as it just takes up more processing and resources away from the machine running it. The way it incodes is a lot like a command prompt render que on a Windows machine. (Which is nothing flashy either) It loads up resources into a batch que and then without any sort of graphic interface besides text and starts encoding.

Which makes it a really strong tool for anyone that needs a large amount of FCPX or other projects rendered into a usable compressed sequence.
Keepping everything to the bare minimum means that this program exports faster than FCPX and Motion could as it does not have to load up extra data and just get right to work.

There are plenty of options and way to costumize the output format. For me I really like the GIF option as it makes it easy to export a smaller and even faster file to send to my clients and have them take a look at the sequince without going all the way to sending a full copy.

There are a lot of cheaper products out there that probably could do just as good of job, but this one is constantly being updated and has a good devloper backing it. So if you run FCPX this is a must have to save time on the exporting process.

The price is $50 and it has been since 2011.

II am a medical educator with limited knowledge of video processing, so take what I saw with a grain of salt.

I like compressor because:

Conversions are WAY faster than with any other program I know.
It is possible to export videos as TIFF/JPEG/PNG frames, which is great for getting still images of medical videos for teaching purposes.
It is possible to import a folder of TIFF/JPEG/PNG frames and convert them to a movie, which is great for creating simple medical education cartoon movies.
It is possible to change frame rates and crop videos (latter great for de-identifying medical videos).

What I do NOT like about compressor is:

1. The .avi movie format is not supported. This is a HUGE negative, as many (most) medical imaging equipment create their video exports as .avi files. Quicktime app of yore used to do many of the things Compressor now does and one of those things was it was able to convert .avi files. Apple, PLEASE add .avi conversion capability to Compressor, which is needed for medical professionals

"Compressor installation is broken and needs to restart your computer to be repaired”. Or whatever the phrasing is. But sudenly during working hours I have to restart my computer, closing Final Cut (another box with bugs), all of my 3D rendering software, audio, all of my network connected computers (each of which of course flashes reports that network computer is disconnected and I have to walk aroud the room to discmiss stupid notification, which is another sad story of modern apple), reopen files and basically just have a full stop during a working day.

I cannot believe this comes from Apple. A simple thing aimed at one function cannot cope with itself. On Apple’s OS. And on Apple’s hardware. Tim Cook's world is so exciting: he’s happy to talk big interviews about cycling and greenpeace and pride and has time for all of this, while his engineers cannot complete a small app that converts videos.

Oh, forgot to mention why this seemingly little thing dissapointed me so much: it happens on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day!