Recommended Project Settings in Compressor 4.2

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Recommended Project Settings in Compressor 4.2

I have an 80 minute video prepared in FCPX 10.2. The project properties currently are 1920x1080, 23.98p, 48kHz Stereo. The goal is to compress at a good quality for customers to download and view on their own computers, with file size ideally under 2GB if that's realistic (as I understand that is a file limit for the distribution service).

The new format for Compressor 4.2 looks radically different.

1.) I am looking for the best settings or output choices in Compressor, whether Built-In or Custom, to accomplish my goal.

2.) Should I "Send to Compressor" from inside FCPX? Or share as a Master File out of FCPX and then pull that into Compressor? Or some other steps?
Please let me know if further information is needed.

Many thanks. 🙂

Compressor, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Apr 20, 2015 1:01 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Apr 21, 2015 7:46 AM in response to paulfromhendricks

You'll need a bit rate of roughly 3,300 Kbps to get the size below 2 GB. How good it looks will depend a lot on the source material; I would do a test with several minutes of the movie that's representative of the content. If you don't like it, consider 720P and test again.

Duplicate the Video Share preset to make a custom setting.

Aside from bit rate, I'd use h.264, Main Profile, CABAC entropy. Or even better, download the x.264 encoder and use that – a type of H.264. If there is a fair amount of motion in your content, choose multi-pass.

These days, I don't think it matters much whether you use Send to Compressor, but out of habit, I prefer to export a Pro Res 422 master file and bring that into Compressor,

Good luck.

Russ

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