Introducing Compressor

So as we come here to Apple's Compressor 4, you may be asking yourself, "why am I even using it?" You are using Compressor to do one of two things: One is you are going to take video on its raw form and change its flavor. You are going to change it from one large file to another large file, and we are going to talk later in this title about why you'd want to do such a thing. And the other big use of it is to take large video and make it small. You can take a look here out in the Finder. I've got a very large video. It's half a gigabyte. I took it down to about ten megabytes using Compressor.

The thing is, you've been using Compressor the entire time you've been using Final Cut X. Now if you're not using Final Cut X, this isn't really an issue. But here inside of Final Cut X you will see that the Share menu underneath the hood is using Compressor to do everything that it needs to do to get video out to places like YouTube, to Vimeo, to export our movies, to put it onto our Apple iOS devices. And you can see there's actually an explicit choice here to send stuff to Compressor. If I go ahead and choose that, when I jump over to Compressor, you'll see it's populated with the actual file. And the idea is that we pick a setting and a destination, we press the button that says Submit and that's going to put our video right through the meat grinder and on the other end give us a compressed video.

What does this look like? Here is our five-hundred-megabyte movie. I am going to go ahead, double-click on it. It's going to open up here. In fact, I am going to right-click and make it open up with QuickTime 7. You may not have QuickTime 7 installed on your system. I like it a little bit better than QuickTime 10, just because I've got a little bit easier adjustment on the size. Here I have got this file. This is at 100% size; it's gigantic. It's a huge file at half a gigabyte. I am going to take it down to half of its size. You can see that's a nice feature of QuickTime 7: makes it nice and small.

Let's close that up. Here is the encoded file. I am going to also open that with QuickTime 7, and you'll see it's not as large. It's almost the same size, but of course I've taken it down to one fiftieth of the original size, and that's what Compressor does for us. It allows us to transcode to take video from one large format to another for postproduction needs, and it allows us to take big video and make it smaller for distribution needs.