How To Compress Video Files With Apple Compressor

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Compressor to compress videos on your Mac. 

The Compressor is an App from Apple. It has been around for a long time as a stand alone purchase. But now more people have access to Compressor than ever before because it is part of Apple's Creator Studio. You can download it here from The App Store and if you've got a Creator Studio subscription you can just get it. What Compressor does is it takes video and it recompresses it so that you get, perhaps, a smaller file or a file that is in a specific format for a specific purpose. Typically people use it with Final Cut Pro as the last step in exporting video. But you can use it any video. For instance video you export from iMovie or raw video clips that you take with your camera. 

One of the problems with iMovie is that when you're done with a project you've got very limited options for exporting. Just a few settings here that you can play with. If you want something more specific where you want to get a smaller file, then you can use Compressor. So, if you are starting an iMovie you want to export with the best quality that you can. Ideally you would use ProRes which is kind of like uncompressed video. But you can see the final size is huge. However, if you don't plan on keeping this intermediate step file you can export it as this huge file and then with Compressor get your final version and then delete this huge one when you're done. If you are more conservative and you're not concerned about quality you can just go with like the high quality here and better quality compression and get a better file that's still is probably bigger than you want but it won't take up as much space in the meantime. You can also take files directly from your camera or perhaps in your Photos Library. You want to export using the unmodified original unless you've applied some effects. Then you can use this export option here and then you just want to set quality as high as you can. 

So once you've got a video ready to compress you can launch Compressor. Then you get an interface that can be a bit intimidating if you've never used Compressor before. It doesn't really look obvious as to what you will do to compress a video. The first thing you want to do is expand the left side. Click this button here to see the left sidebar. Now you've got three things you need to compress a video. First thing you want is the video. So you're going to take the video, like this one here from the Finder, and drag it to this area where it says Add File. Then it adds it here. But it doesn't know what to do with it yet. You've got to give it some compression settings. Now on the left here you've got a bunch of built-in compression settings that come in different categories. So, for instance, you can just go and look at the Apple Devices category and it gives you some settings for viewing on Apple Devices, like for instance on your iPad or Apple TV. So you can pick what you want. Let's say instead of 4K maybe you want to go down HD here. You can select this one and you simply drag it over and add it here. It adds it as a Preset. You actually add more than one, turning an export one video into 3 or 4 different files if you want choosing different settings. Once you've got it Preset here you can select it, like I have here, click on this button and it will bring up the Settings for that Preset on the right. You can modify them for this one time use. So, you can go to video here and you can see the video settings and you can change it if you want. There are a lot of different settings here but I'm going to point out the most important ones. 

First you've got the Size. This is all about Up To. Here it is set to Up To 1920 by 1080. Meaning that if the video is actually smaller in dimensions it will stick to that smaller size. It won't scale it up. But if it is larger it will scale it down. 

The next setting is the Code. So H264 is the general one you want to use for most purposes. But if you're just using this on your own devices AVC will actually get you smaller file sizes. It just may not work with some older hardware. 

Then there is bitrate. So for bitrate you can turn off automatic and you can play with this number. Now this number is actually going to determine the file size you're going to get here. For instance it is set now to 10,000 kilobits per second. Which will literally give you that. The quality is going to depend on hitting that mark. If you want a smaller file you can drag this down and, say, go to under 3000 KBPS and you'll get a smaller file from that. So if your goal is small file then you want to bring down KBPS. If it is still now small enough then you want to try again. But with an even smaller KBPS, or if you notice the quality suffers because of the low number here then you're going to have to just increase it or make tough decisions. 

In general the frame size and the KBPS, those are the main factors for how big the file is. It's always file size versus quality. A smaller file size is going to mean lower quality. A higher file size is going to mean higher quality. You also want to scroll all the way down here to the bottom and you've got a quality setting. You can to play with this for a little bit more control. You've got a bunch of different types of recompression to recompress this. Then you've got a quality setting here. So you can go to Best versus Fastest if you don't mind waiting a bit for getting a slightly higher quality file. 

Now you may not want to actually use one of these built-in presets. But instead add a Custom one. You can click the Plus Button here, say New Preset, and then you have to pick a starting point. You can pick Apple Devices, for instance, or MPEG 4 is a common starting point. Name it something that makes sense to you, like it's for a project and you want all the videos to be the same quality. Then Click Okay. Then you can select this here, change these settings and remember these settings so you can keep reusing this one. I'm going to remove this preset from there and drag this new one here and I'm going to set the quality, and the size, and everything to what I want. In this case I'll change the average bitrate to make it much smaller to make it a smaller file size. 

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Now you want to fix the destination. You can see here it says Location and it is set to something called Source, in other words wherever the video is now just Save the new file there. You can Control Click, Right Click, or two-finger click on this and choose a different location and you can see a couple here or choose Other. You can choose any location if you want. You can also click Here and actually add new locations if you want if you've got some standard folder you've got available there. Once you've got this all set you Click Start Match and it starts processing. It goes from the current Tab to the Active Tab. So this is what is active. You can see Current is now cleared out. You can actually start working on your next compression project while this one is actually processing that video. Then once it is finished here it will disappear from Active and go to Completed. Now back here in the Finder we can see that original file that we dragged in. See the Size and see the new compressed version here. If we double click on this it will open up in Quick Time Player and we can preview it and see if the quality is what we want. 

You'll probably observe, if the file size is much smaller, that indeed the quality is less. But if you play around with the settings enough you can probably get the quality to be only slightly less but for big savings in file size. So those are the basics. But Compressor is a really complex tool that does lots of different things. So without spending hours going into detail here's just some quick tips to help you explore further. 

When you're all setup with a video and a preset you get to go to the top here and there's a line that you can drag left and right, the left side will show you the original. The right side will show you the result of your settings here. Unfortunately it doesn't take everything into account. Like, for instance, the KBPS. But it would take things into account, for instance the frame size. If we said we wanted to limit the frame size to say 640 by 360 then we can see here on the right the lower quality as the output since it is only 640 pixels across.

You can also use the little timeline here to add markers. So, you can go in here and then add a marker, use M, and these markers would be imprinted in the resulting video. Some video services that you  upload to and other uses like Quick Time Player will actually have those as chapters. In addition you can also position this as to what you want to use as the poster frame for the exported file and set that right here. You can see it marked. 

On the right side under Video you do have the ability to add effects. So you can add an effect like changing the Brightness & Contrast of the entire video or adding a Fade-in Fade-out to the video. Removing noise. Lots of different things you can apply across the entire video. In addition you can have a Watermark graphic or a text overlay and use that as sort of a text watermark as well. 

Note that in addition to video settings you have audio settings here. This can be another way to save some file size. Perhaps you've got a video where the audio isn't that important. It's mostly silent. So you may not want it to be at a super high bitrate and save a little space that way. You can also add just an audio file. Compressor will compress audio as well as video. You've got some audio file presets here that you can use and then customize to create a compressed audio file. 

Once you setup a present you don't necessarily actually need to run Compressor to use it anymore. You can select it here and save it as a Droplet, an icon that you can Drag & Drop a video file to and it will then perform the compression. Or you can click here where it says Watch Folders and add a Watch Folder and at any time a video is dropped to that Watch Folder a compression is automatically applied to that video.

While you don't need to be using Final Cut Pro to use Compressor it does have a special relationship with Final Cut Pro. In fact, if you go into Final Cut Pro to File and then Share, you can add Destination and you can select Compressor Presets. Then you can select say a custom preset that you made, like this, and you can see it is added to Final Cut Pro's Destination Window here. So once you've created a Preset Compressor you can simply use it inside of Final Cut Pro as an Export option. So as you can see there's a lot to explore to Compressor. If you've got an Apple Creator Studio subscription you've got Compressor. So go ahead and start using it with your video and/or audio projects. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.