Creating Droplets From Compressor To Compress iMovie Video Files

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this episode let's use Apple's Compressor app to create a quick way to compress video or audio files on your Mac.

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The Compressor is an app that you can find in the Mac App Store. It's from Apple and it costs $50. Once you've added it you can run it and interface is pretty technical looking. Here, under Current at the top, you can see Settings here on the left. You can see a preview area here at the top middle. At the bottom middle you can see a list of files. Nothing is in it right now. On the right you can see an Inspector. So you can look at one of these pre-built settings to see its properties in the Inspector.

So, for instance, we can look at Apple Devices here. You can see there are several different ones. I can select Apple Devices 4K and you can see what sort of compression you're going to get here if you were to use this setting. You can go and look at other settings here as well. You can also go and create your own of course.

Now Compressor is billed as an add on to Final Cut Pro or Logic. It works really well with those apps. For instance in Final Cut Pro you can access all of those different compressor settings. So you can create a custom set of settings and then right in Final Cut Pro you can go to Export, access those settings, and Export your video using Compressor as part of Final Cut Pro. But that doesn't mean you can't use it if you're using iMovie. All you need to do is export from iMovie using the best quality settings.

So here I am in iMovie and I can go to File, Share, and then Share as a File. If I select the compression quality of Best it will export a very high resolution but very large file. Then I can take that file and feed it into Compressor or a stand alone app created by Compressor called a Droplet and it compresses the video to exactly the format that you want. So let's look at creating a custom setting in Compressor and then turning that into a stand alone application known as a Droplet.

I'm going to hit the Plus button here at the bottom and select New Setting. So you start by setting a basic format. Let's go and say MPEG-4 for the format and let's say call this My MPEG-4 and we can add a description if we want. Then I'll hit OK and you'll see it appear on the left under Custom. Now on right here in the Inspector I can change how things look. So I can change the name, the description, and things like that. I could also go into Video and I can change the video settings. A lot of things here you're going to keep the same but, for instance, you may want to change the data rate from Web Publishing to Custom. Then I can go in here and change it from 250 KB per second, which is actually extremely compressed, to something really much higher like 2000. Then maybe I can set it to multi pass if I wanted to. I could also go into Audio and change how the audio is compressed and saved inside the file. 

Once I have this set like I want I could actually test it out. The way you would do this in Compressor is you would drag a file, like this one I have on my desktop, into the list area here. You can drag more than one file. Then I would drag the compression setting on the left over on top of that file. Now it has the file plus the compression setting. Then you'll see a Start Batch button at the bottom. So if I had more than one file I could actually hit Start Batch and it would go through and process each one of those. You could also do some pretty cool things here like Trim and Crop the video here in the preview area. But we won't mess with that right here. 

So I can do Start Batch and Export the video and you can see it goes to the second tab here, the Active tab. You can see the progress. Then when it's done you can actually find it under Completed as well as other things that I've done in the past. Now I can look at the file here and see some things about it in the Finder. If I select the original file and inspect it I could see it was 7.7 MB. This file, on the other hand, is 2.1 MB. If I Preview them I could see the original one, this is how that one looks. I could see the compressed one and you can see a lot of compression artifacts. So I may even want to adjust that to be above 2000 MB per second.

It's perfectly normal to keep trying different things. So to take an example video like this one and set it for some things, export it, see what it looks like and play with those settings again. You can click here and you can see all of those settings. I can say go to 3000 KB per second and try it again. Now when I select this file and I inspect it I can see here the size is 3.2 MB. So let's go and see how that looks and that does look a little bit better. So I may want to keep playing with the settings or I may decide that this is what I want to go with.

I want to use this pretty often. So instead of using Compressor every time what I can do is create what's called a Droplet. So by selecting the settings here on the left, and by clicking on the Actions button here at the bottom, I can select Save As Droplet. I can save this with any name I want. You can see it's going to be dot app. I can put it anywhere I want. I can also set a default location for where once the video is processed the new version is saved. You can set it to desktop, the Movies folders, or the source location the same as the original file. So let me save this here. I'm going to save this little app to the desktop and you can see there it is. 

Now I can go and quit Compressor and in order to compress this video all I need to do is drag and drop it onto this app. It will open up this little window here. It shows the videos I've put in. So I can actually drag and drop several video files onto it and they would all be listed here. In addition I can drag more files, right now, into this list and it would add them. Then I could change the location if I want even choosing Other to put it anywhere I want. Then I can hit Start Batch and it will process that file. Once it's done the app isn't even running anymore. Note that you can also just double click on this to run it and it will start with a blank list here at the top. Then you can add files to it.

So don't forget you can also use Compressor for Audio files. So maybe you're creating something in GarageBand or some other app. Then you could export from there at the highest quality and then use Compressor or a Droplet you create in Compressor to save it out at a certain compression level to be able to upload it to various services online.