Is Compressor a serious product?

[Gabriele Sartori]

Obviously I was talking about H264. This is the only format I’m interested in because it’s so heavy on the system.

Gabriele – California

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Gabriele Sartori] “Obviously I was talking about H264. This is the only format I’m interested in because it’s so heavy on the system.”

But Handbrake uses the x264 encoding library, Compressor does not, although you can setup Compressor to use x264 with some amount of minimal trouble.

Compressor defaults to multi pass, Handbrake does not.

Compressor does a lot more than h264 and is more “serious” in that it is a multifaceted tool that will deliver all types of broadcast, cinema, and web media. If Handbrake meets your needs and is faster, then why not use it? It’s free, does a good job, has a subjectively better encoding library for h264 media, and apparently is “faster” at its limited task of creating h264.

[Gabriele Sartori]

You are saying a number of things that are correct but as you said Compressor is more tunable and it is integrated I’d like to use it but I can’t wait hours to compress, particularly now on 4K, I get impatient. So far I’m using Handbrake that is indeed enough for me but I hate to have an extra app. Handbrake does a decent job also with H265 BTW but for compatibility reasons, I output H264 for now. I came here assuming that some Compressor expert with experience on a 12 core machine can give me a magic solution but I understand it is a corner case not the mainstream utilization. I just don’t understand why Apple doesn’t support well their own high-end HW especially now with a new iMAC Pro with 18 core on the horizon. That machine runs only at 2.4GHZ but it would kill if all the cores can be used. Thanks for all the good intentions though.

Gabriele – California

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Gabriele Sartori] “. I came here assuming that some Compressor expert “

id imagine a “compressor expert” would ask what you’re doing because there is something wrong if you are only using 21% of your hardware.

[Helge Tjelta]

yes it is.

We have 10 seats of FCPX/compressor with our Xsan.
We use compressor/H264 for coding.
We have macpro’s 2012 and 2013 and iMacs
No problem setting up compressor to use all 24 threads. I do it all the time. but remember some codecs will not do multicore very well.
But h.264 does as does prores.

Helge Tjelta
Creative apps for the FCPX ecosystem.

[Gabriele Sartori]

This is good news Helge Tjelta, any suggestions? I usually convert from Apple Prores 4:2:2 into H264 but I can use other input formats if it helps. Any high level setting (i.e. input codec – output codec) that you can recommend. I do prefer H264 in MP4 container but I could live with H264 in MOV container. Thanks!

Gabriele – California

[Helge Tjelta]

Hm, I spoke to soon.

H.264 only gives me 600% max out of 2400%…. the full maxout is when more jobs is running or doing prores output.
All codecs that allow the segment flag to be on, will use full CPU count.

Looks like the x264 is much better at multicore.

cheers Helge

Helge Tjelta
Creative apps for the FCPX ecosystem.

[Andreas Kiel]

Helge Tjelta: “All codecs that allow the segment flag to be on, will use full CPU count.”

That’s true.
Apple H264 doesn’t allow.
One file won’t use all cores, 10 files will use more.
From my experience (from those times I was working in daily business) it’s better to leave 1 core untouched.

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Nick Meyers]

it would be interesting to see how Resolve compares with these, too.
it seems pretty fast to me, but my only comparison is Compressor v3.5

nick

[Gabriele Sartori]

Thanks, it seems that we have the same issue then due to the Apple Codec. I find very strange to see Apple unable to produce a new Codec that takes advantage of their best HW. Incredible.

Gabriele – California