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 Compressor v4.5 on macOS 10.15.7 screenshot and logo | |
| Developer(s) | Apple Inc. |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 4.6.3 / October 24, 2022 [1] |
| Operating system | macOS 11.5.1 or later |
| Type | Data compression |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | apple.com/finalcutpro/compressor |
Compressor is a video and audio media compression and encoding application for macOS made by Apple.
The application used to be available as part of Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, and DVD Studio Pro, and after Apple combined its professional media products into Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio bundles, Compressor became part of these bundles.
Once the bundle model was abandoned by Apple in 2011, [2] [3] a new major version of Compressor (Compressor 4) was released as a separate product on the Mac App Store for $49.99. [4]
Compressor is used for encoding video and audio media in multiple formats, including HEVC (H.265), MPEG-1, MPEG-2 for DVD, QuickTime .mov, MPEG-4 (Simple Profile), MPEG-4 H.264 and optional (third Party and often commercial) QuickTime Exporter Components to export to Windows Media. Among its other features are the ability to convert from NTSC to PAL and vice versa, and the ability to upscale from standard-definition video to high-definition video with feature detail detection to prevent serious quality losses. Filters and effects, such as de-noising or timestamp generation, can be applied to video during the conversion process, and the video can be cropped.
Compressor could be used with the discontinued Qmaster for clustering, or configured as a server to work on the jobs submitted by other computers on the network.
With its update to 4.2 in April 2015, Apple added performance upgrades, as well as the ability to use Compressor to produce a compliant package to submit video content for distribution to the iTunes Store. [5]
QuickTime is a discontinued extensible multimedia framework created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term QuickTime also refers to the QuickTime Player front-end media player application, which is built-into macOS, and was available for download on Windows until 2016.
iMovie is a free video editing application made by Apple for the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad. It includes a range of video effects and tools like color correction and image stabilization, but is designed to be accessible to users with little or no video editing experience. iMovie's professional equivalent is Apple's Final Cut Pro X.
iLife is a discontinued software suite for macOS and iOS developed by Apple Inc. It consists of various programs for media creation, organization, editing and publishing. At various times, it included: iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iWeb, and GarageBand. Only iMovie and GarageBand remain and are now freely available on Apple's Mac App Store. iDVD and iWeb have been discontinued while iTunes and iPhoto have been succeeded by Music and Photos respectively.
Soundtrack Pro is a discontinued music composing and audio editing application made by Apple Inc. featured in Logic Studio and Final Cut Studio that included a collection of just over 5,000 royalty free professional instrument loops and sound effects. It was discontinued with the release of Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, and Compressor 4.
Final Cut Pro is a professional non-linear video-editing application initially developed by Macromedia, and, since 1998, by Apple as part of its pro apps collection. Final Cut Pro allows users to import, edit, and process video footage, and output it to a wide variety of formats.
The following comparison of video players compares general and technical information for notable software media player programs.
Final Cut Express was a video editing software suite created by Apple Inc. It was the consumer version of Final Cut Pro and was designed for advanced editing of digital video as well as high-definition video, which was used by many amateur and professional videographers. Final Cut Express was considered a step above iMovie in terms of capabilities, but a step underneath Final Cut Pro and its suite of applications. As of June 21, 2011, Final Cut Express was discontinued in favor of Final Cut Pro X.
Logic Pro is a proprietary digital audio workstation (DAW) and MIDI sequencer software application for the macOS platform developed by Apple Inc. It was originally created in the early 1990s as Notator Logic, or Logic, by German software developer C-Lab which later went by Emagic. Apple acquired Emagic in 2002 and renamed Logic to Logic Pro. It is the second most popular DAW – after Ableton Live – according to a survey conducted in 2015.
DVD Studio Pro is a discontinued high-end software tool published by Apple Inc. to allow users to create DVD masters to be sent out for replication at production houses. Its tight integration with other Apple applications allowed users to take Final Cut Pro and Motion projects and render them into the DVD format without encoding to intermediary formats.
Final Cut Studio is a discontinued suite of professional video production and post-production made by Apple for the Mac. The suite competed with Avid Media Composer for the high-end movie production market. It first went on sale in 2005.
Apple Qmaster is a system made by Apple Inc. that provides automated work distribution and processing for high-volume projects created with certain digital visual effects software packages: Shake, Autodesk Maya, Final Cut Pro, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro and any UNIX command-line program. It processes such jobs on a cluster of Macs or Xserves.
AVCHD is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of high-definition video. It is H.264 and Dolby AC-3 packaged into the MPEG transport stream, with a set of constraints designed around the camcorders.
The following is a list of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC products and implementations.
Logic Studio is a discontinued professional music production suite by Apple Inc. The first version of Logic Studio was unveiled on September 12, 2007. It claims to be the largest collection of modeled instruments, sampler instruments, effect plug-ins, and audio loops ever put in a single application.
Apple certification programs are IT professional certifications for Apple Inc. products. They are designed to create a high level of technical proficiency among Macintosh service technicians, help desk support, technical support, system administrators, and professional users. Apple certification exams are offered at Prometric testing centers and Apple Authorized Training Centers, as well as online through Pearson Vue.
The Apple Intermediate Codec is a high-quality 8-bit 4:2:0 video codec used mainly as a less processor-intensive way of working with long-GOP MPEG-2 footage such as HDV. It is recommended for use with all HD workflows in Final Cut Express, iMovie, and until Final Cut Pro version 5. The Apple Intermediate Codec abbreviated AIC is designed by Apple Inc. to be an intermediate format in an HDV and AVCHD workflow. It features high performance and quality, being less processor intensive to work with than other editing formats. Unlike native MPEG-2 based HDV - and similar to the standard-definition DV codec - the Apple Intermediate Codec does not use temporal compression, enabling every frame to be decoded immediately without decoding other frames. As a result of this, the Apple Intermediate Codec takes three to four times more space than HDV.
Apple ProRes is a high quality, "visually lossless" lossy video compression format developed by Apple Inc. for use in post-production that supports video resolution up to 8K. It is the successor of the Apple Intermediate Codec and was introduced in 2007 with Final Cut Studio 2. Much like the H.26x and MPEG standards, the ProRes family of codecs use compression algorithms based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT). ProRes is widely used as a final format delivery method for HD broadcast files in commercials, features, Blu-ray and streaming.
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