I will soon be teaching a half-day class on Apple’s Compressor 3. This is a seemingly little-used program that installs with Final Cut Studio 2 (FCS). FCS is a suite of Apple programs that edit video, edit audio, and create DVDs.
Compressor is like the Bridge of Adobe’s Creative Suite: a very valuable tool for batching your final product. Compressor will allow you to encode a single video or audio file into many types of file formats.
You will find that Compressor will up-convert SD video to HD video and down-convert HD video to SD video with a high quality output. What a valuable tool in these days when HD is becoming so prevalent and we are up to our gills with SD video!
Compressor also encodes video for broadcast and handhelds, adds watermarks, add text, add timecode, and applies some Final Cut filters. If you create podcasts with Compressor, you can add hyperlinks to both podcasts and videocasts and add images to your audio-only podcasts (with hyperlinks). Very cool.
This software is truly a quality tool that creates a quality product of your video and/or audio project.
Apple has created some tutorials that will help you see the power and usefulness of Compressor.