Compressor is a video and audio media

compression Compression may refer to: Physical science *Compression (physics), size reduction due to forces *Compression member, a structural element such as a column *Compressibility, susceptibility to compression * Gas compression *Compression ratio, of a ...

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 ...

and

Logic Studio Logic Studio is a discontinued professional music production suite by Apple Inc. The first version of Logic Studio was unveiled on September 12, 2007. It claims to be the largest collection of modeled instruments, sampler instruments, effect plug ...

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 lapt ...

. 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 Mathematics ...

History

The application used to be available as part of

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

Soundtrack Pro Soundtrack Pro is a discontinued music composing and audio editing application made by Apple Inc. featured in Logic Studio and Final Cut Studio that included a collection of just over 5,000 royalty free professional instrument loops and sound e ...

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 mea ...

, and

DVD Studio Pro DVD Studio Pro is a discontinued high-end software tool published by Apple Inc. to allow users to create DVD masters to be sent out for replication at production houses. Its tight integration with other Apple applications allowed users to take Fi ...

, and after Apple combined its professional media products into

and

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 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In compari ...

(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 video coding format, coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of Lossy compression, lossy video compression and ...

for

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kin ...

, 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 ...

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

and vice versa, and the ability to upscale from standard-definition video to

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 (No ...

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.