Compressor is a video and audio media compression and encoding application for use with

Final Cut Studio Final Cut Studio is a discontinued professional video and audio production suite for Mac OS X from Apple Inc., and a direct competitor to Avid Media Composer in the high-end movie production industry. It was developed from 2005 to 2011. Three o ...

and Logic Studio on

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

. It can be used with

Qmaster Apple Qmaster is a system made by Apple Inc. that provides automated work distribution and processing for high-volume projects created with certain digital visual effects software packages: Shake, Autodesk Maya, Final Cut Pro, Compressor, DVD ...

for clustering, or configured as a server to work on the jobs submitted by other computers on the

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematic ...

History

The application used to be available as part of

Final Cut Pro Final Cut Pro is a series of non-linear video editing software programs first developed by Macromedia Inc. and later Apple Inc. The most recent version, Final Cut Pro 10.6.4, runs on Mac computers powered by macOS Big Sur 11.5.1 or later. The ...

, Soundtrack Pro,

Motion In physics, motion is the phenomenon in which an object changes its position with respect to time. Motion is mathematically described in terms of displacement, distance, velocity, acceleration, speed and frame of reference to an observer and m ...

, and DVD Studio Pro, and after Apple combined its professional media products into

and Logic Studio bundles, Compressor became available as part of them. Once the bundle model was abandoned by Apple in 2011, a new major version of Compressor (Compressor 4) was released as a separate product on the

Mac App Store The App Store (also known as the Mac App Store) is a digital distribution platform for macOS apps, often referred to as Mac apps, created and maintained by Apple Inc. The platform was announced on October 20, 2010, at Apple's "Back to the Mac ...

for $49.99.

Features

Compressor is used for encoding video and audio media in multiple formats, including HEVC (H.265), MPEG-1,

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, ...

for DVD, QuickTime .mov, MPEG-4 (Simple Profile), MPEG-4 H.264 and optional (third Party and often commercial) QuickTime Exporter Components to export to Windows Media. Among its other features are the ability to convert from

NTSC The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplement ...

to PAL and vice versa, and the ability to upscale from

standard-definition video Standard-definition television (SDTV, SD, often shortened to standard definition) is a television system which uses a resolution that is not considered to be either high or enhanced definition. "Standard" refers to it being the prevailing s ...

high-definition video High-definition video (HD video) is video of higher resolution and quality than standard-definition. While there is no standardized meaning for ''high-definition'', generally any video image with considerably more than 480 vertical scan lines ...

with feature detail detection to prevent serious quality losses. Filters and effects, such as de-noising or timestamp generation, can be applied to video during the conversion process, and the video can be cropped. With its update to 4.2 in April 2015, Apple added performance upgrades, as well as the ability to use Compressor to produce a compliant package to submit video content for distribution to the

iTunes Store The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, as a result of Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,00 ...

References

External links and references

Apple Compressor 4

Apple Compressor 2 User Manual
(PDF)
New Features in Compressor 2
(PDF) {{mac-software-stub MacOS-only software made by Apple Inc.