Final Cut Studio ’s revision of Compressor , Apple ’s video - compression and -transcoding app , add some very welcome features . Compressor 2 sports a new look ordered with the other fellow member of the Final Cut Studio category ( see screenshot ) . ( Compressor 2 is part of the Final Cut Studio package and is include with stand - alone purchases of Final Cut Pro 5 and DVD Studio Pro 4 . )
Compressor 2 include encoding configurations that output to a variety of medium , from HD - base DVD to roving sound . While most people will expend Compressor for MPEG-2 densification for DVD Studio Pro projects , Compressor 2 has many property that make it as useful as Autodesk ’s Cleaner or Sorenson ’s Squeeze . We encoded high - definition material to MPEG-4 and H.264 for connection delivery , and the results were beautiful and had astonishingly low data point rates . Still , for picture destined for the Web and certificate of deposit - ROM , Squeeze ( ) is a more versatile choice ; it supports more video formats and does a sound line at grim bit - rate compression .
On the audio front , Compressor 2 can encode Dolby AC-3 audio , the most common data formatting for videodisk . Thankfully , Compressor 2 replaces the sticky A.pack utility that accompanied previous versions of DVD Studio Pro . That ’s reason for celebration , but Apple missed an opportunity to ease the transition for warhorse substance abuser : DVD Studio Pro 4 ’s otherwise excellent documentation does n’t specifically cite A.pack ’s demise .
Share the Burden
Topping the listing of new Compressor feature is distribute rendering through Apple ’s Qmaster , a platform first design for Apple ’s Shake compositing curriculum . contract and transcoding videos can be sentence - consume , so rule more processing business leader from other Macs on a local web can help you save clip . The most efficient scenario for distribute rendition is in an optimized environment that has a cluster of Xserves with telecasting media store on a shared Xsan mass so nothing needs to be copied from computer to computer .
In the initial release of Compressor 2 , an optimized render environment like this was necessary to achieve time - efficient encoding — citizenry without this optimized environs who wanted to create an ad hoc bunch from elderly Macs lying around the sign of the zodiac were out of luck . If the computers in such an ad hoc bunch varied greatly in terms of CPU power , it would be possible for a two - computer distributed yield job to take longer that a single - data processor job . But with the 2.0.1 release of Qmaster and Compressor , Apple added financial support for these non - optimise clusters . Indeed , with the 2.0.1 update , mete out renders , even on nonoptimized clusters , will often give you a time advantage . But if you do n’t have shared storage , media will necessitate to be replicate to all the computers ; therefore , dispirited data - rate , compressed - video format such as DV , DV50 , HDV and DVCPRO HD will be considerably suited for distribute provide in these surroundings .
Compressor ’s transcoding capabilities have also been improved with the addition of optical flow image analysis . you’re able to now transcode NTSC video to the European PAL formatting and get very good , though slow , results .
In a month of testing , we never encountered the dreaded “ Can not connect to Background Processes ” bug that plagued all late translation of Compressor . We can hope that this thwarting hemipteron has finally been stomp .
