Exporting H.264 Using High Quality Profile

[Jeremy Garchow]

Compressor 4.1 now offers High Quality profile and two different entropy settings.

Jeremy

[Bryan Mullennix]

Thanks Jeremy! I’m not seeing the ability to upgrade from Compressor 4.0 to 4.1 in the Mac app store. Is this an issue where I need to upgrade to the new Mavericks operating system in order to get this upgrade?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Bryan Mullennix] “Thanks Jeremy! I’m not seeing the ability to upgrade from Compressor 4.0 to 4.1 in the Mac app store. Is this an issue where I need to upgrade to the new Mavericks operating system in order to get this upgrade?”

Correct, sir. FCPX 10.1, Compressor 4.1, and Motion 5.1.

Jeremy

[Bryan Mullennix]

Thank you!

[Bernhard G.]

Hello,

you should give HandBrake a try.

https://handbrake.fr

It is Open Source, reads all ProRes types, uses Lanczos for scaling,
does motion-compensated De-Interlacing (“slower” setting), has Noise-Filtering,
and codes with x264, the best H.264 encoder.

Best regards,
Bernhard

[Jeremy Garchow]

Handbrake is great. I use it a lot.

The only problem is that it’s not plugged in right to FCPX, so you have to essentially export twice, once out of fcpx and once out of handbrake.

It is a pretty good encoder, though.

Jeremy

[Bernhard G.]

[Jeremy Garchow] “The only problem is that it’s not plugged in right to FCPX, so you have to essentially export twice, once out of fcpx and once out of handbrake.
“

Yes this is true. But as long as FCP-X consolidates everything to ProRes under the hood, the export at least is fast and causes no loss in quality.

I would really appreciate if Apple would integrate OpenCL accelerated x264 natively.
On the other hand, a ffmpeg-GUI like iffmpeg https://www.iffmpeg.com, but integrated directly into Compressor with some nice one-click presets for common tasks
(like rewrapping XDCamHD422 into MXF) would be really awesome!

Best regards,
Bernhard

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Bernhard Grininger] “Yes this is true. But as long as FCP-X consolidates everything to ProRes under the hood, the export at least is fast and causes no loss in quality”

Yes, true. I just find it’s rather annoying to have to manage all of those non-necessary files and waste the disk space. It would be fine if we could export reference files again.

[Bernhard Grininger] “I would really appreciate if Apple would integrate OpenCL accelerated x264 natively.”

Intel’s Quicksync on i7’s actually does a pretty good job, but it is single pass only.

You can read about it here if you haven’t already: https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/First-Look-Apple-Compressor-4.1-94026.aspx

MXF4mac, ImEx Suite allows direct export of MXF out of FCPX using Compressor settings. It’s not cheap, but if you need the functionality, it’s well worth it.

https://hamburgpromedia.com/products/mxf4mac/MXF-Import-Export-Suite/MXF-Import-Export-Suite.php

Being able to natively import MXF’s is great too. I use it for Sony F55 footage and saves a ton of space (and time).

Jeremy

[Bryan Mullennix]

Thanks Bernhard for the suggestion of HandBrake, it did the trick! I compared the output between HandBrake and Compressor 4.1 and quality of HandBrake was far superior.

Thanks again!

[Bernhard G.]

You’re welcome! 🙂